“It is simply fantastic to urge that a [stop
and frisk] procedure performed in public by a policeman while the citizen
stands helpless, perhaps facing a wall with his hands raised, is a ‘petty
indignity.’ It is a serious intrusion upon the sanctity of the person,
which may inflict great indignity and arouse strong resentment, and it is
not to be undertaken lightly…. Even a limited search of the outer clothing
for weapons constitutes a severe, though brief, intrusion upon cherished
personal security, and it must surely be an annoying, frightening, and
perhaps humiliating experience.”

In recent years the New York Police Department
has averaged over 600,000 recorded stop and frisks where police officers filled out what the NYPD calls "UF-250" forms. At the
same time, the police department also made an
unknown number of stops, frisks and searches, possibly hundreds of
thousands more, in which UF-250 forms were not filled out. The
numbers of reported and unreported stop and frisks have been increasing
since the 1990s prompting multiple lawsuits, an investigation and report by
the NY state attorney general, protests, lengthy academic and research
studies, strongly critical newspaper columns, and many news stories. Yet they go on, targeting mainly teenagers and young men, nearly 90% of whom are blacks and
Latinos.

As the following excerpts note in passing,
the stops often include a search of the person's clothing and possessions.
Although it is rarely discussed, most such searches inside of pockets,
clothing and possessions are illegal and unconstitutional.

As everyone
including Governor Cuomo now say, the marijuana possession arrests are a
direct product of the stop and frisks. In 2012 the stop and frisks were down
22%. In 2012, the marijuana possession arrests were down ... 22%.
Despite Governor Cuomo's push for decriminalization to stop the marijuana
arrests, and the support of all five NYC district attorneys and much of the
legislature, it may not be possible to end the marijuana arrests without
seriously altering the stop and frisks. And Bloomberg and Kelly may stall
that change until the next mayor takes over in 2013. We will see.....

Center for
Constitutional Rights law suit against the NYPD's Stop and Frisks, Floyd, et
al. v. City of New York.http://www.ccrjustice.org/floyd
Web site page with briefs, summary of the case, news coverage, information
about coming to court, and much more.

"The Stop-and-Frisk
Challenge," by Matthew McKnight, The New Yorker, March 27, 2013
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/the-stop-and-frisk-challenge.html
The plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York, a class-action lawsuit
regarding the N.Y.P.D.’s stop-and-frisk practices that went to trial last
week, contend that stop-and-frisk practices violate the Fourth Amendment’s
prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures and the Equal
Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. But that’s the legal wording.
In a press briefing a few days before the trial began, David Ourlicht, one
of the four named plaintiffs, put the violations he feels into more everyday
terms:I don’t [want to] have to walk outside and have that thought in the back
of my mind: “This time will they shoot me or will I get beat up? Will I go
to jail for something I didn’t do?” I want to be able to move on and not
have to feel that. I don’t want my friends to have to feel that anymore. I
don’t want my—when I have kids, I don’t want them to feel that.

"Orwellian Law Enforcement:
Police 'Stop and Frisk' Detentions in New York City" by By Li Onesto, March
27, 2013
http://www.globalresearch.ca/orwellian-law-enforcement-police-stop-and-frisk-detentions-in-new-york-city/5328718More than 1.6 million people live in Manhattan, New York. If every single
one of these people were detained and harassed, had their pockets gone
through and were humiliated, if all these people had this done to them not
only once but three times this would be the number of stop-and-frisks
carried out by the NYPD since 2004: FIVE MILLION in the last nine years.

"Walking While Black in New York," New York Times Editorial Board, March 22,
2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/opinion/walking-while-black-in-new-york.html?_r=0
The New York City Police Department has a long history of violating
constitutional rights by stopping, questioning or frisking people on the
streets without legal justification. The city has steadfastly denied that
the detentions — made under its increasingly unpopular stop-and-frisk
program — have been based on race.

But that claim is being challenged in Floyd v. the
City of New York, a federal class-action trial in Manhattan, where witnesses
including police officers are arguing that the department does, in fact, use
race as the basis for stopping and frisking hundreds of thousands of
citizens a year.

This week, the court heard a troubling recording
secretly made last month by Officer Pedro Serrano, of the 40th Precinct, in
the South Bronx. Mr. Serrano is one of a handful of officers who began
tape-recording conversations with their colleagues or superiors to document
what they saw as wrongdoing.

In the recording, Deputy Inspector Christopher
McCormack is heard urging Mr. Serrano to stop, question and, if necessary,
frisk “the right people at the right time, the right location.” When Mr.
Serrano asked for clarification about who the “right people” were, the
inspector replied: “The problem was, what, male blacks.” He continued, “And
I told you at roll call, and I have no problem telling you this, male blacks
14 to 20, 21.”

On its face, this would seem to violate the Fourth
Amendment, which protects citizens against unlawful search and seizure.
Police officers can legally stop and detain a person only when they have a
reasonable suspicion that the person is committing, has committed or is
about to commit a crime.

The trial court also heard this week from Officer
Adhyl Polanco of the 41st Precinct, who had taped proceedings in his station
house. Mr. Polanco testified that officers were subject to a quota system,
which required them to write more summonses, make more arrests and create
stop-and-frisk encounters. He said that his superiors wanted “20 summons and
one arrest per month.” The plaintiffs argue that a quota system put officers
under pressure to make unconstitutional stops.

The trial is expected to last six weeks. But the
testimony has already pointed to disturbing conduct by the police command
and a profound indifference to the constitutional rights of the city’s
citizens.

"Momentum Surges For Police Reform," By Natasha Lennard, Salon, March 20,
2013NYC Politicians Push For A Police Watchdog. A Federal Judge
Examines Stop And Frisk.
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/20/man_turns_face_into_tattoo_billboard_for_internet_porn_sites_regrets_it/The NYPD is currently on trial in more ways than one. While a federal
judge presides over a landmark case challenging the constitutionality of the
police department’s stop-and-frisk tactic, political will is growing to ban
the racially divisive policing practices and to increase oversight on NYPD
behavior. From the streets of East Flatbush to the forums of mayoral
debates, momentum is growing to challenge the NYPD as it currently operates.

"In The Floyd Case, The Nypd Faces Tough Scrutiny Of Its Stop-And-Frisk
Tactic," by Bruce Reilly, The Guardian, UK, March 19, 2013New York's mayor defends the policy, but critics say crime rate
claims are overstated, with communities hurt by racial profiling, The
Guardian, UK, March 19, 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/nypd-stop-frisk-floyd-case
The New York Police Department is on trial in Floyd v City of New York, and
the public is watching.

"NYPD Stop-And-Frisk Lawsuit Starts 'Trial Of The Century,' Lawyer Says" by
Matt Sledge, Huffington Post, March 13, 2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/13/stop-and-frisk-lawsuit_n_2870401.html
The Center for Constitutional Rights contends that the NYPD's practices
disproportionately affect people of color, even allowing for higher crime
rates in black and Latino neighborhoods. It hopes to force the NYPD to curb
-- though not end -- its use of the practice following community
consultation. The judge in the federal case, Floyd v. City of New York, is
the same one who briefly halted a component of stop-and-frisk that targets
Bronx buildings in a separate lawsuit brought by the New York Civil
Liberties Union. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin's ultimate decision on
stop-and-frisk will apply to both cases.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A civil liberties lawyer on
Wednesday asked a U.S. judge to force the New York Police Department to
develop and implement clear policies on how it stops people in and around
certain buildings in the borough of the Bronx.

The request capped seven days of testimony before
U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan, in one of three main
lawsuits challenging aspects of New York City's controversial "stop and
frisk" crime-fighting tactics.

In the Bronx case, the New York Civil Liberties
Union and 12 plaintiffs have asked Scheindlin for a preliminary injunction
against aspects of "Operation Clean Halls," a citywide police patrol program
inside and around private, mostly low-income housing buildings that opt to
enroll.

In his closing argument Wednesday, NYCLU attorney
Christopher Dunn asked the judge to compel the city to improve oversight of
the police so that stops of people suspected of criminal trespass outside a
"Clean Halls" property are made with reasonable suspicion.

"We want a real, specific department policy and
procedure that spells out how and why a person can be stopped outside 'Clean
Halls' buildings," Dunn said. Dunn also asked the judge to order new
training and accountability measures....

The NYCLU argues that last year, 1,137 of 1,857
stops in the Bronx of people suspected of criminal trespass outside "Clean
Halls" properties were made without reasonable suspicion and were
potentially unlawful....

Over the course of the seven-day bench trial, the
judge heard testimony from high-ranking police officials, individual
plaintiffs and expert witnesses. Scheindlin on Wednesday said she would rule
only after reviewing additional written briefs to be submitted later this
month.

In a ruling last month allowing another
stop-and-frisk lawsuit to proceed to trial, Scheindlin said that case
involved "matters of grave public concern." She also questioned whether
police, in their zeal to keep housing residents safe, were violating the
rights of the same people they were seeking to protect.

The case is Jaenean Ligon et al v City of New York,
U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, no. 12-cv-2274.

_______

Momentum
Builds in the Fight Against Stop-and-Frisk, by Christie Thompson, The
Nation, October 31, 2012

New York City Council member Deborah Rose adjourned
a three-and-a-half-hour evening hearing on stop-and-frisk with a word of
advice: “Be safe traveling home,” she said. “Avoid the police.”

There seemed little else to say, now that Rose and
the packed room of hearing attendees had heard nearly thirty testimonies of
abuse and harassment at the hands of the New York City Police Department.

Among others, Rose heard from a Bangladeshi
teenager who was patted down by two male police officers looking for
marijuana on her way to school, a mother who was beaten by police in front
of her home for having a closed bottle of alcohol, and a civil rights
activist who was thrown against a wall and frisked during an afternoon smoke
break outside his Manhattan office.

The city council hearings in Brooklyn and Queens
last week provided a forum for roughly sixty community members to share
their stories and speak out on stop-and-frisk. Between the two hearings, all
but one of the testimonies offered emphatically opposed the practice.
Many who spoke called for support of the Community Safety Act, legislation
that would increase oversight of a police department now operating with near
complete autonomy.

Momentum has been building in the community effort
against stop and frisk. On October 22, activists gathered for the National
Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality, many marching in memory of those
killed by police shootings. As city council considers the Community Safety
Act, organizers have been increasing pressure on local legislators to
address the current impunity of the NYPD.

The City Council’s public safety committee first
held a hearing on the Community Safety Act in Manhattan at 10am on
Wednesday, October 10, but few from the communities most impacted by
stop-and-frisk were able to attend. “Their voice needed to be a part of the
record,” said council member Rose. “We are hearing from the so-called
experts, but we haven’t had the personal testimonials.” The hearings were
the first opportunity many community members had to share with city
officials their stories of mistreatment by the NYPD.

Fifteen-year-old Ceiro De Jesus from the Bronx was
one of the youngest to speak in Brooklyn. He and a group of friends were
playing football at a neighborhood park on a Saturday afternoon, when two
white police officers parked next to the field and ordered them to put their
hands up.

When De Jesus asked why they were being frisked, the
cop answered, “Because you’re young, out of control and colored . now get
your ass home before you learn how it is to be in jail.”

De Jesus told his mother, but her advice was the
same as council member Rose’s: watch out for cops. He and his friends have
stopped going to the park, and mostly stay indoors. “Ever since that day, I
feel like I have no freedom,” he said.

Several former NYPD officers also spoke out against
the number-driven system pushing police to make random stops. “Our community
is under siege,” said retired officer Howard Henderson in Queens. “There is
profiling and there [are] quotas. In this community, there’s a quota
of one arrest and thirty summons in a month. Certain communities [in] the
city do not have quotas. In these communities, the minority communities,
they definitely do.”

Missing from both the Brooklyn and Queens hearings
were representatives of the Mayor’s office or the NYPD. (Bloomberg sent his
lawyer Michael Best to attend the October 10 hearing, but NYPD has not had
an official representative at any of the stop-and-frisk hearings.) Both
Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelley have been highly
defensive about the program. While they admit that individual abuses of
power need to be addressed, they continue to claim that the tactic at its
core is making New York City streets safer. They have repeatedly claimed
that gun violence has decreased as a result, though a gun was recovered [4]
in roughly .001 percent of the 685,724 stops conducted in 2011.....

The proposed legislation would prohibit officers
from using racial profiling as a police tactic, and make them accountable
for policies that have a disproportionate racial impact, such as
stop-and-frisk. It also broadens the ban on profiling to include targeting
individuals based on ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and housing and
immigration status. During a stop, officers would have to identify
themselves and cite a reason for the stop. Though NYPD would still be
allowed to perform pat-downs, they would have to explain the individual’s
right to refuse a search of their pockets and belongings without a warrant.

Most importantly, Bill 881 of the act calls for the
creation of an Inspector General’s office to perform routine reviews of NYPD
policies. “The number of New Yorkers who believe the problem is a systemic
lack of oversight leading to a culture with no accountability is growing,”
said council member Brad Lander, a vocal supporter of the act. The FBI, CIA
and police departments in Los Angeles, Chicago and DC all have independent
oversight. The NYPD is one of the few city departments not subject to such
review.

It is not just black and Latino communities calling
for the passage of protections that heighten police accountability. Several
activists also testified on the need for deeper investigation into the
department’s anti-terrorism efforts, which regularly sends informants into
Muslim neighborhoods. “We’re not being thrown up against walls, we’re being
spied on,” said Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab American Association in
New York. Recognizing the links between stop-and-frisk and police
surveillance, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition has joined with
Communities United for Police Reform to advocate for the new legislation.
“At the end of the day, it’s about discriminatory policies of the NYPD. The
more communities involved the more effective we will be at reforming it,”
she said.

They lined up last night to give their testimony on
their experience with the NYPD practice of stop and frisk. They represented
a broad spectrum from teens and seniors to those with kufis to others with
clean shaven heads. They were parents, civic leaders and victims of the stop
and frisk policy.

It was the New York City Council Committee on Civil
Rights public hearing at York College on the New York Police Department’s
use of stop, question and frisk. There was a similar hearing the previous
day in Brooklyn. The hearing was an attempt to capture stories from the
public on the record in an effort to “further bolster our efforts to reform
stop, question and frisk,” said Committee chair Councilwoman Deborah Rose.
She called the policy “one of the most pressing civil rights issues of the
time”.

Brought up in groups of four, speakers were given a
time limit of three minutes but dropped down to two when the long line of
people for testimony was assessed. Some of the testimonies were personal and
often times the speakers would run over the limit with a tale too compelling
to interrupt.

Marlon Castro was subjected to homophobic slander
during his stop. “You AIDS infested faggot,” was the term Marlon says the
cop used when he was stopped.

Manny, a 14 year old Bangladesh teen and resident of
Jamaica, has been stopped on the way home from school. She believes the
stops are because of her “darker skin,” she said. “They treat us like we are
already guilty,” she said.

Current and retired police officers placed their
testimony on the record telling their tales of retaliation for pushing back
against the policy. In one of the rare editorial moments of the hearing,
Councilwoman Rose extended her apologies for the retribution that Officer
Polanco spoke of at his turn at the microphone during his tenure. She also
thanked Howard Henderson, a retired police officer, who spoke of
productivity quotas police had to make in certain areas. “Thank you for
vindicating me,” she said on the issue.

And throughout the night, the support of police
while condemning the policy was evident. Councilman Jumaane Williams, a
co-sponsor of the hearing, acknowledged the police that risk their lives
daily for our safety in his closing remarks. But it was also evident that
there is a disdain for the Police Commissioner and Mayor. “If the
Commissioner and the Mayor refuse to engage in this conversation they are
continually and increasingly putting this city in danger” Councilman
Williams said in his closing remarks.

“We are making every effort to make changes”, said
Council Woman Rose during her remarks. She said the Council had been
“stymied by Commissioner Kelly” calling the action “blatantly
disrespectful”.

Civic and community leaders from the Southeast
Queens also took their turn at the microphone in their support for reform
and oversight. Donovan Richards, Chief of Staff to Councilman Sanders, said
“we can no longer afford to do nothing”. Leroy Gadsden, President of the
Jamaica Branch NAACP, spoke about how the NYPD is out of control and called
the policy “racial profiling”.... The standing room only attendance
also included various community and civic leaders.

________

Report: Cops
more likely to harass non-white LGBTs, by Clare Trapasso, New York Daily
News, October 25, 2012

Black and Hispanic gays and lesbians in Jackson
Heights are more likely to be harassed by cops than their straight peers —
especially during stop and frisks, a new report claims.

The Make the Road New York report, released Tuesday,
also alleges that transgender women are particularly vulnerable to being
arrested and charged with prostitution — often without cause.

“When (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender)
people are stopped and frisked, it’s a very different experience from when
heterosexual people are stopped,” said Karina Claudio-Betancourt, who runs
Make the Road’s LGBTQ Justice Project. “They are usually verbally (and)
physically harassed.”

Her group, along with various elected officials, is
trying to pass the Community Safety Act, which would limit racial profiling
in stop and frisks and require cops to get consent before searching anyone.
“Stop and frisk is a huge problem,” said City Councilman Daniel Dromm
(D-Jackson Heights). “People are degraded; they’re embarrassed.”

Almost 29,000 people were stopped and frisked in
2011 in the 110th and 115th precincts, which cover Jackson Heights, Corona
and Elmhurst, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Of LGBT respondents surveyed in the Make the Road NY
report, 51% reported that they had been harassed when stopped by police.
Only a third of straight respondents said the same. The report surveyed more
than 300 people in total.

________

Stop
and Frisk Comes Under Fire at Public Hearing, By Kathleen Horan, WNYC.
October 23, 2012

District attorney’s offices in New York City have
generally supported the Police Department — or kept quiet about their
reservations — during the escalating battle over the department’s
stop-and-frisk program, under which hundreds of thousands of citizens are
stopped every year, often for no reason.

But a hearing under way in Federal District Court in
Manhattan is featuring an open and fiery dispute between the Police
Department and an assistant district attorney from the Bronx, who has
testified that her office began to have misgivings about the legality of
some trespassing arrests as far back as five years ago.

The federal lawsuit, Ligon v. City of New York, was
brought on behalf of people who say they were illegally stopped, given
tickets or arrested on trespassing charges in apartment buildings, some in
buildings where they lived. The suit focuses on the city’s two-decade-old
“Clean Halls” program, under which police officers patrol private buildings
with the permission of landlords.

Jeannette Rucker, a veteran prosecutor, recounted
that her office began to have questions about many of the Police
Department’s trespassing arrests in the past several years. She said Bronx
judges “just started dismissing these cases left and right” because they
believed that the officers had no legitimate legal reason for approaching
the people who had been arrested — sometimes merely because they had been
seen entering or leaving a Clean Halls building. Her staff also told her
that judges were throwing out cases because the police had charged people
with trespassing in their own buildings.

In a memo in April 2009, Ms. Rucker notified the
Police Department that trespassing cases had become “problematic for the
district attorney’s office” because judges were dismissing them for
insufficient cause. The memo cautioned officers to check to establish
people’s residency and to determine whether they were legitimate visitors.
Yet the improper arrests were still a big problem two years later. Ms.
Rucker testified that in 2011, “we were getting people who were arrested who
were tenants. We were getting people arrested who ... were lawful visitors.
And I’m like: What can we do to stop this?”

Last year, the Bronx district attorney’s office
issued another memo to the police, noting that courts had held that a person
who merely exited a Clean Halls building could not be legally stopped unless
the officer had a clear reason to suspect criminality. This summer, Ms.
Rucker notified the Police Department that her office would no longer
prosecute Clean Halls or public housing trespassing cases based on paperwork
and would require that officers be interviewed.

The case could potentially go into next year. But
the prosecutor’s testimony is strong evidence of the program’s problems and
the Police Department’s failure to protect people’s constitutional rights.

__________

Prosecutor Testifies on Stop-and-Frisk Tactics, By Joseph Goldstein, New
York Times, October 15, 2012

As a federal court hearing began on Monday in a
critical challenge to New York City’s use of stop-and-frisk tactics, a Bronx
prosecutor testified that she believed the police were wrongly stopping and
arresting innocent people for trespassing.

The testimony of the prosecutor, Assistant District
Attorney Jeannette M. Rucker, came as the hearing opened in Federal District
Court in Manhattan, the first court proceeding in which a federal judge is
expected to rule whether the Police Department has engaged in a pattern of
unconstitutional stops under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration.

The hearing is expected to feature testimony over
two weeks from numerous people who say they were improperly stopped, as well
as from several of the department’s highest ranking officials, including
Chief of Patrol James Hall. The police witnesses are expected to defend the
stops as both legal and necessary and to explain the legal training that
officers receive.

On Monday, Ms. Rucker spoke about the concerns that
led her in July to send a letter to the Police Department alleging that
officers were engaging in wrongful arrests. Ms. Rucker, who runs the
complaint room, where charges are drawn up against defendants, testified
that she had grown concerned over the legality of some trespass arrests
after noticing that judges had “started dismissing these cases right and
left.”

Soon, she explained in testimony, her staff of
prosecutors began telling her that they had found instances in which the
defendants lived in the very buildings where the arrests occurred. “O.K.,
this seems to be a problem,” Ms. Rucker said, recalling her thinking.

She said she later received an anonymous letter from
a person claiming to have been arrested on trespassing charges while leaving
a building with a friend who lived there. She forwarded it to other senior
prosecutors in the Bronx, adding her own note. “I said, ‘Enough is enough,
we have to stop this,’ ” Ms. Rucker recounted.

Ms. Rucker explained that in one instance an
assistant district attorney, David Grigoryan, went to the building where a
trespass arrest occurred, where he spoke with a guard and learned that the
defendant “lived in the building with his sister.”

That case, Ms. Rucker testified, “really pushed me
over the edge.” In July, she sent a brief letter to numerous police
officials outlining her concerns and announcing this change in policy: From
then on her office would prosecute trespass arrests only after interviewing
the arresting officer. Previously, prosecutors went forward with a case
simply on the basis of the paperwork the officer filled out.

________

New
York City Council Seeks to Limit Police Stop-and-Frisks, By Henry Goldman,
Bloomberg.com, Oct 10, 2012

The New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk
policy came under attack from city council members considering four laws
that would restrict the encounters and create an inspector general to
monitor the practices.

Police stopped 685,724 people they deemed suspicious
on streets in 2011, of whom 84 percent were black or Hispanic, according to
the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York- based nonprofit that in
2008 filed a federal civil-rights suit in Manhattan against the NYPD over
the tactic.

“It’s despicable, totally unacceptable and it should
not be tolerated by the NYPD,” Harlem Councilman Robert Jackson told Michael
Best, counsel to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who opposes the bills. “It needs
to be totally revamped and it needs to be done now.”

About 200 people packed the council’s City Hall
chambers today for the hearing, where members took turns questioning Best
and expressing disappointment at the absence of Police Commissioner Raymond
Kelly, who declined an invitation to appear. More hearings are scheduled in
New York’s five boroughs in the next several weeks.

Best presented a statement to the Committee on
Public Safety arguing that it had no power to change police practices. The
state has exclusive control, he said. Council Speaker Christine Quinn said
her members rejected the administration’s argument. A council memo created
for the hearing cited the 1993 creation of the Civilian Complaint Review
Board to investigate police abuse as one example of legislative oversight.

“I hope today’s hearing sends a message that the
council’s call for reforming stop, question and frisk continues,” said
Quinn, a probable Democratic mayoral candidate in 2013. “Although stop,
question and frisk should be used as a tool in the police department’s tool
box, when we have almost 800,000 stops at the peak targeting almost
exclusively African-American and Latino men in neighborhoods of lower
income, clearly that is a problem.”

The NYPD patrol guide informs officers they may stop
and question a person they suspect has committed or is about to commit a
crime, frisk the individual by running hands over clothing to feel for a
weapon and search inside a pocket or other clothing to determine if an
object is a weapon. A small percentage of those stops result in finding
weapons, Quinn said. [Note: It is not correct that police can
legally frisk someone if they suspect the person is about to commit a crime.
They can frisk only when the have articulable reason to believe that the
person is armed and dangerous. See "It's Time to Fix The Frisk," Aug 19
below.]

Inspector General

Today’s hearing began a day after The Nation
magazine published an audio recording purporting to capture a police officer
stopping a Harlem teenager, threatening to break his arm and using a
profanity while calling him a “mutt.”
New York spent $633 million settling and paying judgments on thousands of
lawsuits alleging police abuse and civil-rights violations from 2006 to
2011. The new laws would allow a person to sue the city with evidence that
an officer was motivated by racial profiling in a stop-and-frisk.

The laws would also create an office of inspector
general within the NYPD to monitor civil liberties and community relations.
Police would be required to identify themselves when stopping people and
obtain consent before searching someone’s pockets or belongings.

_________

Stopped-and-Frisked: 'For Being a F**king Mutt' [VIDEO] by Ross Tuttle and
Erin Schneider, The Nation, October 8, 2012

On June 3, 2011, three plainclothes New York City
Police officers stopped a Harlem teenager named Alvin and two of the
officers questioned and frisked him while the third remained in their
unmarked car. Alvin secretly captured the interaction on his cell phone, and
the resulting audio is one of the only known recordings of stop-and-frisk in
action.
In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally
valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin
with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to
smack you?”

When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with
arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the
stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says,
“Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the
fuckin’ face."

“He grabbed me by my bookbag and he started pushing
me down. So I’m going backwards like down the hill and he just kept pushing
me, pushing me, it looked like he we was going to hit me,” Alvin recounts.
“I felt like they was trying to make me resist or fight back.”

Alvin’s treatment at the hands of the officers
may be disturbing but it is not uncommon. According to their own
stop-and-frisk data, the NYPD stops more than 1,800 New Yorkers a day. A New
York Times analysis recently determined that more than 20 percent of those
stops involve the use of force. And these are only the numbers that the
Department records. Anecdotal evidence suggests both figures are much
higher.

In this video, exclusive to TheNation.com, Alvin
describes his experience of the stop, and working NYPD officers come forward
to explain the damage stop-and-frisk has done to their profession and their
relationship to the communities they serve. The emphasis on racking up stops
has also hindered what many officers consider to be the real work they
should be doing on the streets. The video sheds unprecedented light on a
practice, cheered on by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray
Kelly, that has put the city’s young people of color in the department’s
crosshairs.

Those who haven’t experienced the policy first-hand
“have likened Stops to being stuck in an elevator, or in traffic,” says
Darius Charney, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional
Rights. “This is not merely an inconvenience, as the Department likes to
describe it. This is men with guns surrounding you in the street late at
night when you’re by yourself. You ask why and they curse you out and rough
you up.”

“The tape brings to light what so many New
Yorkers have experienced in the shadows at the hands of the NYPD,” says Ben
Jealous, President of the NAACP. “It is time for Mayor Bloomberg to come to
grips with the scale of the damage his policies have inflicted on our
children and their families. No child should have to grow up fearing both
the cops and the robbers.”

“This audio confirms what we’ve been hearing from
communities of color, again and again,” says Donna Lieberman, executive
director of the NYCLU. “They are repeatedly subjected to abusive and
disrespectful treatment at the hands of the NYPD. This explains why so many
young people don’t trust the police and won’t help the police,” she adds.
“It’s not good for law enforcement and not good for the individuals who face
this harassment.”
The audio also betrays the seeming arbitrariness of stops and the failure of
some police officers to fully comprehend or be able to articulate a clear
motivation for carrying out a practice they’re asked to repeat on a regular
basis.
And, according to Charney, the only thing the police officers do with
clarity during this stop is announce its unconstitutionality.

“We’ve long been claiming that, under this
department’s administration, if you’re a young black or Latino kid, walking
the street at night you’re automatically a suspicious person,” says Charney,
who is leading a class-action lawsuit challenging the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk
practices. “The police deny those claims, when asked. ‘No, that’s not the
reason we’re stopping them.’ But they’re actually admitting it here [on the
audio recording]. The only reason they give is: ‘You were looking back at us

’ That does not rise to the level of reasonable
suspicion, and there’s a clear racial animus when they call him a ‘mutt.’”

In a significant blow to New York City’s use of
stop-and-frisk tactics, the Bronx district attorney’s office is no longer
prosecuting people who were stopped at public housing projects and arrested
for trespassing, unless the arresting officer is interviewed to ensure that
the arrest was warranted.

Prosecutors quietly adopted the policy in July after
discovering that many people arrested on charges of criminal trespass at
housing projects were innocent, even though police officers had provided
written statements to the contrary.

By essentially accusing the police of wrongfully
arresting people, the stance taken by Bronx prosecutors is the first known
instance in which a district attorney has questioned any segment of arrests
resulting from stop-and-frisk tactics.

Bronx prosecutors are now requiring that they
interview the arresting officer in the “hopes of eliminating tenants and
invited guest from being prosecuted unlawfully,” according to a letter to
the Police Department from Jeannette Rucker, a bureau chief in the district
attorney’s office....

Steven Banks, the chief lawyer of the Legal Aid
Society in New York, said that the new requirement put “a procedure in place
to verify that the stop and subsequent arrest were proper.” “This is exactly
what prosecutors should be doing before proceeding with criminal
prosecutions — namely making sure that formulaic statements by police
officers actually have some basis to support the arrest and prosecution,”
Mr. Banks said.

The city’s reliance on stop-and-frisk has come under
intense scrutiny and legal challenges, as critics charge that the police
disproportionately target minorities and harass innocent people. That
sentiment is especially prevalent at housing projects, which account for
about 10 percent to 15 percent of all police stops.

________

New York 'Stop And
Frisk' Trial Set For March 2013, by Basil Katz, Reuters, August 27, 2012

NEW YORK, Aug 27 (Reuters) - The broadest legal
challenge to the New York Police Department's controversial crime-fighting
tactic known as "stop and frisk" will head to trial in March, a U.S. judge
ruled on Monday.

The case stems from a class action lawsuit filed in
2008 by four black men claiming they were improperly targeted by police
because of their race.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan
granted class action status to the lawsuit in March, saying the plaintiffs
had established their cases were emblematic of a city-wide problem.

The City promptly appealed her decision and the NYPD
has strongly defended the tactic, arguing it has been critical in taking
guns off the streets and achieving an historic drop in crime rates. The
police deny that race or quotas motivate stops and say they are stopping
people considered suspicious.

At Monday's hearing, the judge said the case had
dragged on long enough and noted that the March 18, 2013 trial would be more
than five years since the case was first filed.... Judge Scheindlin is
also overseeing two other separate lawsuits contesting the NYPD tactic

_________

"It’s Time To Fix The Frisk: NYPD Is Training Its Officers In Improper
Measures That Cause Widespread Resentment Among City Residents" By Norman
Siegel and Ira Glasser, New York Daily News Oped, Sunday, August 19, 2012

The NYPD’s hugely expanded
tactic of stopping, questioning and frisking people, nearly entirely in
African-American and Latino communities, has caused deep and divisive
resentments, and more than a little justifiable anger. It doesn’t have to be
that way.

Police Commissioner Ray
Kelly should focus on ensuring that officers follow all the legal standards
that govern how police are permitted to interact with the public – starting
with when cops are authorized to frisk someone, and when they are not.

A frisk is the most
personally intrusive part of a stop-and-frisk encounter and the one most
likely to generate anger. In 2011, the Police Department conducted 380,000
frisks. There is good reason to believe that many, perhaps most, of these
frisks were illegal.

There is also good reason to believe that the NYPD has, in its training
program, given potentially thousands of officers incorrect or imprecise
information, leading them to think they have far more discretion to frisk
people than the law in fact allows.

That’s because the
department’s training materials misstate the legal standards governing when
frisks are permitted and when they are not.

Consider these facts
concerning stops and frisks:

Last year, the NYPD
reported that officers stopped people for questioning almost 700,000 times,
up from about 150,000 in 1998 and 313,000 in 2004. How has this happened?

In order to perform a legal stop, what the U.S. Supreme Court has called a
“forcible stop,” in which the person is not free to leave, an officer must
have a reasonable suspicion, based on articulable, specific facts, that
“criminal activity may be afoot” and that the person stopped is involved or
knows something about it.

A frisk usually takes place after an officer has stopped someone. As we have
all seen on TV, the officer pats down a person by running his or her hands
over the subject’s body and external clothing.

Because this pat-down is more personal and humiliating than just stopping
and questioning an individual, the court has ruled that cops must meet a
different and higher standard before conducting a frisk.

A police officer may legally frisk someone only if the officer has
reasonable suspicion to believe that the person is “armed and dangerous”
and, as a result, poses a threat to the officer, or people nearby, during
the course of questioning at close range.

The Supreme Court has ruled that such reasonable suspicion must be based on
more than a hunch or a feeling that someone is “armed and dangerous.” To be
legal, an officer’s suspicion must be based on specific, articulable facts,
such as seeing something clearly indicating the presence of a gun. For
example: a tell-tale bulge beneath clothing.

Reasonable suspicion that “criminal activity may be afoot” is enough to stop
and question an individual, but it is not enough to frisk the person. The
singular justification for a frisk is to protect the police officer and
others nearby, when the police officer is questioning someone at close
range.

The exceedingly low number of guns and other weapons found during frisks
suggests that police did not really have fact-based reasonable suspicion
that they were frisking “armed and dangerous” people, which is what the law
requires.

While conducting those 380,000 frisks last year, police found 780 guns and
7,252 weapons of all kinds. For guns, that’s a hit rate of less than
one-quarter of one per cent – and for all weapons, less than 2%.

If the police actually had fact-based reasons to believe people were armed
and dangerous, how could the officers be wrong nearly 100% of the time? The
likelihood is they are frisking illegally – that is, without legally
sufficient reason.

The cause of this may lie
in part in the way they are being trained. Recently, we discovered a video
that shows an NYPD lawyer explaining how police are trained to frisk. That
police lawyer explicitly misstates the law.

After making a stop, he
says, “if necessary, we can frisk.” He does not define what would be
necessary. He says nothing about “armed and dangerous” or about the facts
that would justify reasonable suspicion of “armed and dangerous.”

He just says “if
necessary.” His language is, at a minimum, very misleading. Without doubt,
he presents an insufficient description of the law and, at worst, a legally
incorrect one.

The NYPD Patrol Guide and
written NYPD training materials include similar misstatements, or
confusingly imprecise statements, of the law. The materials instruct
officers to “frisk, if you reasonably suspect you or others are in danger of
physical injury” or to frisk if they “reasonably suspect that subject has,
is or is about to commit a VIOLENT crime.”

This is not what the
Supreme Court rulings require. It is at best imprecise and certainly far
less than what is legally required, which is a fact-based reasonable
suspicion that the person being questioned at close range is at that moment
“armed and dangerous.”

How are cops supposed to
apply the law if they are not taught the correct legal standards? Is it any
wonder so many hundreds of thousands of legally dubious frisks take place,
and have taken place, over and over again, for years?

As a tool,
stop-question-and-frisk may have its place in particular cases. But as a
high-volume mass tactic, with startlingly meager results in terms of arrests
and guns found, serious questions are raised about whether cops are
themselves obeying the law. In any case, we do not oppose all uses of stop,
question and, in appropriate cases, frisk, but it must be done legally. This
won’t happen if police are improperly or imprecisely trained to encourage
more discretion than the law allows.

Accordingly, we, together
with several others, including the former police chief and commissioner of
public safety of Atlanta, a retired NYPD captain, two retired New York
Supreme Court Justices and the president of the Puerto Rican Bar
Association, have written to Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly,
requesting that they change the Patrol Guide and training materials to
conform to what the law requires.

Through a spokesperson,
they have “declined to comment.” That is simply unacceptable. They need to
be held accountable. The violation of the constitutional rights of too many
New Yorkers must stop now. And there will be no end to the anger and the
resentment if it does not.

Siegel and Glasser are,
respectively, former executive directors of the New York and American Civil
Liberties Union.

_________

Judge Bars Expert’s Testimony in Stop-and-Frisk Suit, By Russ Buettner,. New
York Times, August 17, 2012

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg
has repeatedly said that the small number of guns found by police officers
during stop-and-frisk encounters shows that the program is working as a
deterrent, and not that the police are exercising poor judgment in deciding
whom to stop, as critics have argued. But a federal judge said on Friday
said that the city had “no evidence” to make the deterrence claim, and
called the argument “too speculative” to be admitted in court by New York
City’s expert witness in a class-action lawsuit challenging the
constitutionality of the city’s use of stop-and-frisk tactics. The city’s
expert appeared to be trying to “to justify stops on the basis of their
deterrent impact, regardless of their legality,” Judge Shira A. Scheindlin
of Federal District Court in Manhattan wrote.

It was the latest strongly
worded ruling by Judge Scheindlin in a civil suit filed on behalf of people
who were frisked on the streets and released. In granting the case
class-action status in May, she condemned what she called the city’s “deeply
troubling apathy towards New Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional
rights.” A trial in the case could begin before the end of the year. The
city of Philadelphia, faced with a similar suit, signed a consent decree
last year that has reduced the number of encounters. Mayor Bloomberg has
suggested that crime rose there as a result.

The suit argues that the
city is conducting stop-and-frisk encounters on the basis of race, in
violation of the 14th Amendment. The city says that the stop-and-frisk
program, which dates to the 1990s, is concentrated in high-crime areas, and
does not focus on minorities. A plaintiffs’ expert witness in the case is
expected to testify that his analysis of city data shows that about 10
percent of stops result in an arrest or summons, and guns are seized in only
1 of every 1,000 stops. “I found these statistics powerful evidence of a
widespread pattern of unlawful stops,” Judge Scheindlin noted.

In response, the city
sought to have its expert, Dennis C. Smith, an associate professor at New
York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, testify that
finding guns was not the appropriate measurement of success for a
“proactive, prevention-focused” tactic. Rather, Professor Smith would argue
that a goal of the program was to convince would-be gun carriers to leave
their guns at home.

Mayor Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Raymond E. Kelly have made the same argument. In the mayor’s
most full-throated defense of the tactic, he told a black congregation in
Brooklyn that the policy was deterring people from carrying guns. “By making
it ‘too hot to carry,’ the N.Y.P.D. is preventing guns from being carried on
our streets,” the mayor said at the First Baptist Full Gospel Church of
Brownsville. “That is our real goal — preventing violence before it occurs,
not responding to the victims after the fact.”

Judge Scheindlin also
suggested that the city was seeking to make the suit a referendum on whether
stop-and-frisk tactics reduce crime, but she said the trial would focus
narrowly on whether how the city has employed the tactic passes
constitutional muster.

The city’s Law Department
did not comment of the aspects of their expert testimony that the judge
disallowed. But in a statement, the department said it was pleased that Mr.
Smith would be able to critique the plaintiff expert’s analysis of the role
of race in stop and frisks.

Darius Charney, a lawyer
at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the case against the
city, said the city had framed the issue as whether or not its
stop-and-frisk policy worked. “We’re not here to argue whether
stop-and-frisk is a wise police tactic,” Mr. Charney said. The argument, he
said, was, is “the way the Police Department is doing it legal or not.”

__________

"Pockets of City See Higher Use of Force During Police Stops" By Ray Rivera,
New York Times, August 15, 2012

... Police officers from
the nearby 44th and 46th Precincts patrol the streets, from time to time
stopping and frisking young men, mostly black and Latino. And when they do,
statistics show, they use physical force far more often than the police do
anywhere else in the city.... Last year, the police made a record 680,000
stops, more than 80 percent of those people black or Latino. A federal judge
this summer approved a class-action lawsuit accusing the department of using
race as a basis for the stops.

But often overlooked is
how frequently police officers use some level of physical force in these
encounters. People who have been stopped say that if they show the slightest
bit of resistance, even verbally, they can find themselves slammed against
walls, forced to the ground and, on rarer occasions, with officers’ guns
pointed at their heads.

The police used some level
of physical force in more than one in five stops across the city last year,
according to an analysis by The New York Times. In the West Bronx, the rate
was more than double that. Yet the high level of force seldom translated
into arrests, raising questions among black and Latino leaders about whether
officers were using enough discretion before making the stops in the first
place, much less before resorting to force.

The four precincts with
the highest use of force — the 32nd in Upper Manhattan, the 44th and 46th in
the Bronx and the 115th in Jackson Heights, Queens — all include or have
included what the police call “impact zones,” violent pockets that the
police routinely flood with officers, often in their first assignment out of
the academy, in an effort to suppress crime. That combination of putting
inexperienced officers in the worst neighborhoods may be one reason that the
use of force is so high, residents said. And the encounters, they added,
while apparently not leading to a higher number of physical injuries, do
create lasting feelings of resentment and a distrust of officers.

“I feel sometimes a lot of
the rookies that come out don’t have the proper training, and it’s actually
a fear factor on their part,” said Felipe Carrion, 42, who runs a barbershop
on the Grand Concourse in the 44th Precinct. “They’re actually afraid of
getting hurt themselves.” Two months ago, Mr. Carrion said, he was standing
outside his shop when two officers confronted him. “They asked me what I was
doing in front of the shop and I said I was the owner,” he recalled. “They
said, ‘No, you’re not. You’re not the owner. Let’s see some ID.’ ” But as
Mr. Carrion reached for his identification, the officers shoved him against
the wall. “I was like, ‘You’re using police brutality. You’re not supposed
to be doing that. Let me show you ID.’ ” The officers calmed down after he
showed them his identification, but not before shoving him against the wall
again and searching him, he said. Both officers, he said, “looked like they
were right out of the academy.”

The Times interviewed
dozens of people in the 32nd, 44th, 46th and 115th Precincts who told
stories of physical encounters with the police. Many of the people
interviewed said they had been stopped multiple times without any force
being used. But if they displayed any resistance, even verbally, like asking
why they were being stopped, the police sometimes got rough....

The 46th Precinct has
about 128,000 residents and includes the predominantly black and Hispanic
neighborhoods of University Heights, Morris Heights and Fordham. Officers
used force in 58 percent of stops last year, the highest rate of any of the
city’s 76 precincts, according to The Times’s analysis. Yet, just 3 percent
of stops that involved force resulted in an arrest — the lowest rate in the
city. By contrast, officers in the 111th Precinct in the Bayside
neighborhood of Queens, which is 87 percent white and Asian, were the least
likely to apply force, using it in 4.7 percent of stops. Yet 40 percent of
those stops ended in an arrest.

It was in the 46th
Precinct that Christopher Graham said he was stopped by two officers last
winter as he and a friend were leaving his friend’s apartment building. The
officers guided them to the wall of the building and began frisking them,
Mr. Graham, 19, said. When the officer got to his groin area, Mr. Graham
flinched, he said. “I said, ‘Whoa, what are you doing?’ ” Mr. Graham
recalled. “The cop put his hand on the back of my cap and, boom, smashed my
head into the wall of the apartment, for no reason.” The resulting gash sent
blood gushing down his cheek and took six stitches to close, he said. Mr.
Graham, who was neither arrested nor issued a summons in the stop, still
bears a scar next to his left eye.

Over the previous six
years through 2011, officers in the 44th Precinct led the city in force
used, applying it in 54 percent of all stops, more than double the city
average of 23 percent over that period. In 2010, officers there used force
in more than 6 out of every 10 stops. The 32nd Precinct in Central Harlem
and the 115th Precinct in Jackson Heights and Corona, Queens — also
predominantly black or Hispanic — had among the city’s highest rates as
well. Yet in each of these precincts, arrests when force was used were lower
than the city average of 13 percent...

The presence of impact
squads in high-crime areas is not enough to explain why force is used so
often in some precincts. The 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, Brooklyn, has the
city’s highest violent crime rate, and the police stop residents at nearly
three times the rate as in the 44th and 46th Precincts. Yet the police used
force in only 14 percent of stops in Brownsville last year, well below the
city average.

State Senator José R.
Peralta, a Democrat of Queens whose district includes the 115th Precinct,
said he was already concerned by the high number of stops in the area. But
he said he was surprised to learn, from a Times reporter, how many of those
encounters involved physical force. “Those are very troubling statistics,”
he said. The community has some pockets of high crime, he added, but the
overall amount does not correspond “to the extent of the force being used.”

Justin Serrano was 13 the
first time he was stopped by police. He says he was walking his 7-year-old
brother home from school when police forced him against a wall, patted him
down and kept him in the back of a patrol car for more than an hour while
both boys cried. Then they let Serrano go, telling him it was a case of
mistaken identity. It was a pivotal moment in Serrano's life....

The
NYPD's policy of detaining and sometimes searching anyone officers deemed
suspicious has prompted an emotional debate and a federal lawsuit.... The
NYPD stopped close to 700,000 people on the street last year, up from more
than 90,000 a decade ago. Nearly 87 percent were black or Hispanic. About
half were frisked. About 10 percent were arrested.

A federal judge in May granted class-action status to the lawsuit, meaning
thousands of people who have been stopped over the years could potentially
join the complaint introduced by the Center for Constitutional Rights on
behalf of four black men. In June, the New York Civil Liberties Union rolled
out a "Stop and Frisk Watch" smartphone app that allows bystanders to record
police stops and instantly alert others to where it is taking place.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin said there was "overwhelming evidence"
police have conducted thousands of unlawful stops based on flimsy
justification such as "furtive movement." She berated the NYPD for
displaying "a deeply troubling apathy toward New Yorkers' most fundamental
constitutional rights."

The next day, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced changes to officer
training and supervision, and the number of stops has since declined
dramatically....

"Nobody should ask Ray Kelly to apologize — he's not going to and neither am
I," Bloomberg said on the day of the ruling. "And I think it's fair to say
that stop, question and frisk has been an essential part of the NYPD's
work."
The city government and the NYPD did not respond to requests for comment for
this story.

Other cities have adopted policies systems similar to New York's, provoking
the same debate. Last year, officials in Philadelphia placed its "stop and
frisk" program under court supervision to settle a federal lawsuit alleging
racial profiling. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee faced a backlash when he raised
the possibility of adopting "stop and frisk" to get guns off the streets.
Lee announced Tuesday that he was no longer considering it....

Last year, the number of stops of young black males between the ages of 14
and 24 — 168,126 — exceeded the city's entire population of black males in
that group — 158,406 — according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.

"The cops, they come around the corner. They see a young Latino kid. I was
walking with my shorts below my butt. I guess that's the way they see kids,
like, in gangs," said Serrano. "I couldn't even hold my little brother on
the way home. He was terrified of me."

Kevin Vidal, 17, a senior at Manhattan Business
Academy, was relaxing in his cousin’s car late one night in Jamaica, Queens,
on the way to his grandfather’s house. They were speaking their native
language, Spanish, when an NYPD officer decided to inspect the car.The
officer told Kevin and his cousin to exit the car. When Kevin asked why, the
police officer said he smelled drugs, and told his partner to check the
trunk of the car. The police officer did not find any drugs or illegal
objects. In the end, Vidal and his cousin were let go, but the experience
left a lasting impression on him.“He was just suspecting us because we were
speaking Spanish,” Vidal said . “I felt like they were being racist.”

This year, New York City police officers carried out
more stop-and-frisks than ever before. Many young people believe these
tactics are straining the relationship between the youth and police. Andrew
Joseph, 17, a senior at Bishop Ford high school, is one of the young New
Yorkers who believe stop-and-frisk tactics are not right.“I think that it’s
wrong that they discriminate against certain people,” said Joseph. “[They]
stop certain ethnicities more than others.”Joseph thinks that young people
are also upset at police because they are the authority.“To put it simply,
we don’t want the man holding us down,” he said.

Robert Gangi, Founder of the Police Reform
Organizing Project at the Urban Justice Center, works to change the methods
of the NYPD through meetings, petitions, and media such as YouTube
videos.“[The Stop-and-Frisk tactics] are harmful to the individuals who are
subjected to it,” he says. “[They] are mainly focused on young black and
brown men…in an attempt to send a message and make the streets hard for
them.”Gangi believes that stop-and-frisk not only affects the youth, but
also the communities they grow up in.“[They] undermine the social norms that
are building blocks to maintain a stable community,” he said.He believes the
numbers of stop-and-frisk incidents are growing because of demands from the
police officer’s superiors.“[These tactics] are driven by an excessively
engrossed quota system,” says Gangi.

A New York civil liberties
leader called Thursday for the police department to sharpen the language it
uses to train officers on its stop-and-frisk policy, to prevent
unconstitutional checks of people on the street. Former New York Civil
Liberties Union director Norman Siegel said the department's training guide,
patrol guide and a June NYPD stop-and-frisk training class for new officers
does not clearly define the conditions under which an officer has a legal
right to frisk a citizen.

___________

"Stop-and-Frisk in New York City," Editorial, New York Times, August 8, 2012

The New York City Police
Department is trumpeting a decrease of about one-third in the number of
citizens detained under its increasingly unpopular stop-and-frisk program.
The news comes as a relief, since New Yorkers, nearly all of whom were
innocent of any crime, were stopped nearly 700,000 times last year.

But the problems with this
program were never just the number of stops. The real test is whether police
officers can both reduce the number of stops and obey the law, which
requires them to have reasonable, articulable grounds for suspicion before
detaining people on the streets.

This point was underscored
earlier this summer, when Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court
granted class action status to a lawsuit accusing the Police Department of
using race as the basis for stopping and frisking New Yorkers. The judge
rebuked the city for its “deeply troubling apathy toward New Yorkers’ most
fundamental constitutional rights,” and found “overwhelming evidence” that
the program had led to thousands of baseless, unlawful stops. Despite the
police claims that the stops keep criminals and weapons off the streets,
only about 6 percent of stops lead to arrests, and last year, only one in
every 879 stops turned up a gun.

Asked to explain the recent
drop in stops, police officers told The Times that many sergeants conducting
roll calls had stopped emphasizing the need to stop and question people on
street. According to the department, it conducted 203,500 stops in January,
February and March of this year — a record number — but stopped only 133,934
in April, May and June. Even so, it will most likely be several weeks before
a data analysis by the lawyers in the class action suit, Floyd v. City of
New York, provides a detailed sense of whether the trend toward illegal and
discriminatory stops has indeed subsided.

News accounts continue to
illustrate how the program has alienated communities of color. This week,
for example, Wendy Ruderman reported in The Times about a little-discussed
aspect of the program — the humiliating toll that it has taken on women, who
say that male police officers have singled them out without cause for
invasive searches and harassment.

In one case, a woman said she
was sitting on the front steps of her home in the Bronx on a recent summer
night when police officers rifled through her handbag, fishing out a tampon,
a sanitary napkin and finally birth control pills, about which they
questioned her. Another young woman from Harlem Heights said police officers
who claimed to be searching for a rapist interrupted her and two female
friends, demanded identification and then patted her down. “It was
uncalled-for,” she said. “It made no sense. How are you going to stop three
females when you are supposedly looking for a male rapist?”

People who have been singled
out for unjustified searches have expressed similar sentiments all over the
city. The longer those searches continue, the more public discontent will
grow.

__________

__________

"NYPD May Be Training Officers To Do Illegal Frisks," by NY1
News, August 8, 2012

Some lawmakers and lawyers say the NYPD may be
training officers to illegally frisk people.Attorney Norman Siegel says for
police to legally frisk someone, they must suspect that person is "armed and
dangerous."But he says these words are never mentioned in police training
materials.As a result, Siegel says the controversial policy may be
contributing to a large number of unconstitutional frisks."Reasonable
suspicion of any other crime is enough to stop and question an individual
but it's not enough to frisk him," Siegel said.

Last year, more than 46,000 women were stopped and
nearly 16,000 were frisked by New York City Police officers-- a source of
embarrassment and, some women say, sexual intimadation, reported the New
York Times.Of the 16,000 who were frisked, guns were found in 59 cases,
that's 0.13-- less than one percent of all searches, further evidence for
the argument by civil rights leaders that the bulk of stop-and-frisk
encounters are legally unjustified. Nevertheless, the laws governing street
stops are blind to gender, and the training does not draw a distinction
between male and female suspects, Police Inspector Kim Y. Royster said.

San
Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has dropped plans to implement a New York-inspired
stop-and-frisk policy following outcry from community leaders and residents
who said it would lead to racial profiling.Instead, Lee was introducing a
policy Tuesday that targets gun violence through crime tracking software and
community leadership, spokeswoman Christine Falvey said.

__________

Graph from the New York Civil LIberties
Union

For Women in Street Stops, Deeper Humiliation, By Wendy Ruderman, New York
Times, August 7, 2012

She
took a breath and exhaled deeply, hoping the whoosh of air would cool her
temper and contain her humiliation as the officers proceeded to pat her
down. The laws governing street stops are blind to gender. Male officers are
permitted to frisk a woman if they reasonably suspect that she may be armed
with a dangerous weapon that could be used to harm them. A frisk can
escalate into a field search if officers feel a suspicious bulge while
patting down the woman’s outer layer of clothing or the outline of her
purse.

Last
year, New York City police officers stopped 46,784 women, frisking nearly
16,000. Guns were found in 59 cases, according to an analysis of police
statistics by The New York Times.

While
the number of women stopped by officers in 2011 represented 6.9 percent of
all police stops, the rate of guns found on both men and women was equally
low, 0.12 percent and 0.13 percent, respectively. Civil rights leaders have
argued that the low gun-recovery rates are a strong indication that the bulk
of stop-and-frisk encounters are legally unjustified. (The number of police
stops has dropped by more than 34 percent in recent months.)

When
officers conduct stops upon shaky or baseless legal foundations, people of
both sexes often say they felt violated. Yet stops of women by male officers
can often involve an additional element of embarrassment and perhaps sexual
intimidation, according to women who provided their accounts of being
stopped by the police. And many incorrectly believe that the police, like
Transportation Security Administration officers, are required to have female
officers frisk women.

__________

“Drop in Stop-and-Frisks
Not a Sign of Policy Change: Bloomberg” By Colby Hamilton, WNYC, August 06,
2012”

This morning, the New York Post had a breakthrough: its reporters
came to the conclusion that the widespread practice of stop-and-frisk by the
NYPD is a success. We solved it, guys. No more complaining about the
infringement on constitutional rights, racial profiling or any of that other
left-leaning drivel that the NYCLU loves to cook up.

But how did the Post come to this conclusion? Well, the media
organization simply just looked at the numbers. According to Rebecca
Harshbarger and David Seifman, the reason why we can lay out the 'Mission
Accomplished' banner for the controversial means of searching citizens,
notably minorities, is because of the corresponding crime statistics that go
with it.

Exhibit A: Between January 1st and March 31st, there were 203,500
individuals who were stop and frisked, 881 guns seized and 24,571 crimes
recorded in the books.

Exhibit B: Between April 1st and June 30th, there were 133,934
stop-and-frisk targets with 732 guns seized and 27,832 major crimes
reported.

Notice the drop in stop-and-frisks and the 12% spike in crime. Well, there
you have it, people - it's a wrap... unless you've ever taken a class in
statistics. Then, this conclusion might seem a little far-fetched to
believe.

Okay, how do we say this to the Post and its conclusionwithout
coming off as pretentious, finger-wagging elitists that have no sense of a
reality that doesn't include being judgmental. This is going to be hard;
take a deep breath, John. Well, here goes nothing:

You can't
do that. You just can't. Although this is hardly mentioned anywhere in the media
besides maybe in Ezra Klein or Nate Silver's writing, what the New York
Post did with the stop-and-frisk and crime numbers is against
mathematical axioms.

And the rule-breaking is simple: you cannot make a wholehearted declaration
of something based on a correlation. It is statistical logic that just
because X spiked and Y fell flat doesn't mean that X and Y are in bed
together. A correlation is basically a relationship between two factors that
may have some sort effect on each other; when you write research
papers smothered in statistics, every student knows to stress that maybe. In
other words, one doesn't necessarily explain the other.

What the Post is doing underlies the main problem with basing a
conclusion off of a correlation: there are other factors we must all
take into account....

But sometimes numbers don't mean all they seem. Today's story by the New
York Post — that says that the number of police stops fell 34 percent in the
second quarter of 2012 — is certainly interesting. But quarter-to-quarter
changes in the number of NYPD stops are not uncommon: In 2011, the number
dropped 15 percent between the second and third quarters, then jumped 12
percent over the last three months of the year. Even bigger shifts occurred
earlier under Mayor Bloomberg: From 2006 to 2007, the annual number of stops
dropped by 33,000, before beginning a steady rise — at least until now.

But questions of significance aside, the sharp drop in stops will become
fodder for those who've claimed that crime is spiking in the city because
political pressure in May and June forced the NYPD to back down on its
street stops....

__________

“Your Camera
Can
Stop NYPD Abuse. See a stop-and-frisk? Record it on your phone.” By David
Galarza, New York Daily News, August 3, 2012

Many critics of the New York Police Department's mass stop-and-question or
frisk policy focus not on the race of the people stopped but on the sheer
volume of encounters. They say this reflects a larger problem for the NYPD:
an obsession with metrics. The incredible decrease in crime during the 1990s
attached enormous political weight to the city's statistics on major felony
offenses. Inside the department, observers say, this translated into a
fixation with numbers...

Well, given the steep drop in stops, what is happening to crime? So far in
2012, murders and car thefts are down in the city compared to the same
period last year. Rape (4.7 percent), robbery (5.9 percent) and grand
larceny (9.8 percent) are up considerably, while felonious assault and
burglary have climbed 2 percent or less.

Is the decrease in stop-and-frisk an explanation for the increases? Maybe.
Or maybe not.

Crime was reported to be up early in the year, when the number of stops had
actually increased. After the first quarter, New York was on pace to stop
800,000 people this year. It's important to remember that the second quarter
decrease is coming off a record high in January-March.

Beyond that, recent experience establishes little pattern for how stops and
crime interact. According to the FBI, from 2010 to 2011 the number of
violent crimes in New York City increased 6 percent. Was this because the
NYPD had decreased its number of stops? Nope. The number of NYPD encounters
soared 14 percent last year. On the other hand, from 2006 to 2007, as the
number of NYPD stops dropped 7 percent, the number of violent crimes fell as
well (by just over 3 percent).

Obviously, this doesn't suggest NYPD stops cause crime. Sometimes stops rise
in reaction to a crime jump. Sometimes they're not connected at all. In our
analysis of stops in the 75th precinct last year, we found that the most
common crimes associated with arrests made after stop-and-frisks were
possession of marijuana and criminal trespass. Neither offense has much to
do with the violence that's making headlines.

_________

“Street Stops in New York Fall as
Unease Over Tactic Grows” By Joseph Goldstein and Wendy Ruderman, August 3,
2012

The number of times police officers stopped, questioned and frisked people
on the streets of New York City has dropped significantly, by more than 34
percent, in recent months, and a key contributing factor appears to be that
police commanders have grown wary of pushing for such stops at daily roll
calls, police supervisors said.

At the same time, a general feeling of unease about the tactic by officers
on the street — who have seen widespread criticism of so-called
stop-and-frisks in the news media and by the courts — has also contributed
to the drop, some say, with officers simply choosing not to question people
they might have stopped before.

The decline suggests that officers are unsure whether the political support
remains for street stops, long a focal point of Police Commissioner Raymond
W. Kelly’s crime-fighting strategy. In recent months, three court rulings
have raised questions about the New York Police Department’s use of the
tactic, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly have put in place new
measures aimed at ensuring lawful stops.

“Cops are nervous, and supervisors are nervous” about the stop-and-frisk
practice, said a police supervisor, explaining the drop. The supervisor,
like other officers interviewed, spoke on the condition that he not be named
for fear of angering his bosses. Another said that officers who were not
pursuing as many stops were thinking to themselves, “I don’t want to be on
the receiving end of any kind of allegation.”

The Police Department conducted 203,500 stops in January, February and March
this year, according to the department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne — a
record number. But in the second quarter — April, May and June — the police
stopped 133,934 people, he said. During this period, the issue received
considerable attention in the news media. The second-quarter stops were
about 25 percent lower compared with the number of street stops in the
second quarter of 2011, police officials said. Generally, about half of the
street stops resulted in the police’s frisking the person, police officials
said...

New York’s police officials said that the department was not stepping away
from the tactic and that the lower numbers merely reflected changes in the
way armies of rookies were assigned to high-crime areas. Fewer officers have
been assigned over the past few months to Operation Impact, a program that
puts recent graduates of the Police Academy in high-crime neighborhoods with
instructions to seek out suspicious behavior. These new officers conduct 30
percent to 40 percent of the department’s street stops, Mr. Kelly said....

Mr. Kelly acknowledged that the practice had come under scrutiny but said he
did not believe that recent criticism by civil rights leaders played a role
in the drop-off. He pointed to enhanced training and the “draw down” of
Operation Impact officers....

There are three daily roll calls in each precinct, in which information is
shared and crime patterns and assignments are discussed before officers go
on patrol. In recent months, several officers said, many sergeants
conducting roll calls have stopped emphasizing the need to stop and question
people on the street.

“They don’t ask for it anymore,” an officer in the Bronx said. “They just
stopped.” This is key, the officer said, because when sergeants were asking
for them, “it starts becoming a quota or a production goal.” “Why is it so
important how many 250s someone did?” the officer added, referring to a
form, a UF-250, filled out after a stop-and-frisk episode.

A police officer in the Bronx said that officers detected a mixed message
from the top. In recent months, the officer noted, Mr. Bloomberg’s support
of the stop-and-frisk tactic has, in the eyes of many officers, softened. In
addition, the officer noted, Mr. Kelly ordered all officers to go through
retraining on how to conduct lawful stop-and-frisk encounters. “You see an
about-face, and it’s like they’re saying there was something wrong with how
it was done before,” the officer said. “Before, you had the mayor and the
police commissioner defending stop and frisk to the end.”

The officer also noted that a federal-court decision in May granted
class-action status to a lawsuit on behalf of many New Yorkers who had been
stopped. That decision, the officer said, had concerned officers, leading
them to wonder if the federal judge was ultimately going to hold that the
Police Department’s street stops had led to widespread Fourth Amendment
violations.

“People read those articles and realized this may be illegal,” the officer
said. A Supreme Court decision in 1968 permitted the police to conduct
street stops if they had a reasonable suspicion that criminal activity was
afoot and to subsequently frisk the person if the officer was concerned for
his or her safety because of a belief that the person was armed....

“I do believe there is a realization on the part of the New York Police
Department that perhaps the number of stops got too large for the
communities and the police officers to deal with,” the chairman of the City
Council’s Public Safety Committee, Peter F. Vallone Jr. said. Mr. Vallone,
who is generally supportive of the police’s use of street stops, said that
the number of stop-and-frisk encounters had gone “higher than we should go,”
given a reduced police force. He added that “officers had been left feeling
the strain of a large amount of stop and frisks.”

__________

“Stop-and-Frisk Episodes
Drop: After setting a record in the first quarter of 2012, the New York
police cut back on the number of warrantless stops they made from April 1 to
June 30” New York Times, August 3, 2012

Well-trained cops ... are part of the reason
stop-and-frisks have dropped dramatically this year, Police Commissioner
Raymond Kelly said Friday. At a press conference at police headquarters,
Kelly responded to a report that the controversial practice of cops stopping
and searching people — the majority of whom are young black and Latino men —
fell by 34 percent between the first and second quarters of this year.
Viewed as a crime reduction tool by law enforcement, stop-and-frisk however
has triggered criticism from elected officials and civil liberties groups.

Kelly linked the decline in part to a
department-wide retraining program where lawyers worked with officers to
explain exactly what type of behavior rises to the level of "reasonable
suspicion" and justifies a stop.
Another factor could be a change in record-keeping that eliminated
redundancies in how stop and frisks are counted, Kelly said.

The plummeting number of stop-and-frisks could also
be related to how officers are deployed, Kelly said. The NYPD has reduced
the number of "impact" officers — rookies assigned to high-crime areas — who
conducted about 30 percent of stop and frisks earlier this year.

With facts and statistics staring down the New York Post's attempted
defenses of the New York Police Department's controversial stop-and-frisk
agenda, the Post has been forced to resort to purely emotional appeals in
their attempt to maintain public support for the policy.

Over the past few months, the New York Post has published several news
pieces dedicated to interrogating the friends and family members of recent
New York City shooting victims. Each story features someone emotionally
close to the case speculating about whether ramping up the New York Police
Department's controversial "stop-and-frisk" policy could have saved their
loved ones' lives. Meanwhile, the Post's editorial page has been littered
with hyperbole and graphic imagery -- fear mongering designed to scare
readers into believing that ending stop-and-frisk will result in "more blood
in the streets."

Several recent interviews in the news section of the New York Post have
followed the above theme. Given the unconditional support for stop-and-frisk
expressed by the Post's editors over past months, it's difficult to view
these stories as anything more than an effort to exploit the raw emotions of
their subjects in order to push the paper's political objectives in a
"straight news" format....

Former Mayor David Dinkins weighed in with NY1 on
the growing controversy over the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy on Wednesday.
Speaking with political anchor Errol Louis on "Inside City Hall" Wednesday,
Dinkins said stop-and-frisk may be a needed strategy but that it is often
abused.

__________

“In Harlem, a Surprising
Pair, Allied Against Violence” By Wendy Ruderman, New York Times, July 31,
2012

It was an unusual pairing: the gruff and pragmatic police veteran who
exhibits little tolerance for political rhetoric, and the Harlem political
activist whose inflammatory oration once incited widespread criticism. Yet
there they stood, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Lenora B. Fulani,
next to each other on Tuesday in a news conference at the Adam Clayton
Powell Jr. State Office Building in Harlem.

__________

“To Help Close the
Achievement Gap, Address Stop-and-Frisk” By Udi Ofer, New York Times, July
26, 2012.

Eighteen-year-old Angel Ortiz feels lucky when a stop-and-frisk encounter
doesn’t also lead to a wrongful arrest. In February last year, when Angel
was in the 10th grade, he was decidedly unlucky. After he left a friend’s
home in Far Rockaway, Queens, two police officers stopped, handcuffed and
arrested him for trespassing in the friend’s building, even though Angel had
done nothing wrong. Angel spent several hours in jail and missed school to
appear in Queens Criminal Court. All charges against him were eventually
dropped, but his anger over how the police treated him lingers.

Unfortunately, Angel’s experience is not unique. These sorts of encounters
with the police have become rites of passage for many black and Latino young
men who attend New York City public schools. First you learn to read and
write, you study math and science, and if you’re lucky, you get to go to gym
class. But soon after, you also learn how to put your hands up against the
wall to be frisked, walk through metal detectors to go to school, and to
remain calm when police officers rifle through your backpack without your
permission...

Anyone interested in increasing student achievement, and particularly in
closing the achievement gap, should pay close attention to the impact of
stop-and-frisk practices on the lives of black and Latino students,
including on their view of authority and ability to succeed academically.
According to an analysis conducted by the New York Civil Liberties Union, 21
percent of all N.Y.P.D. street stops last year — 145,652 — were of young
people ages 8 to 18. Black and Latino youth comprise 89 percent of these
stops, while white young people made up only 7 percent of the stops.
Sixty-one percent of all stops of young people resulted in a frisk, a
humiliating experience where a police officer pats you down, often
forcefully, in public — a step that a police officer can take only if he or
she believes that the young person has a weapon that poses a threat to the
officer’s safety. And the data make clear that the N.Y.P.D. gets it wrong
the vast majority of the time: Only 1.4 percent of frisks of young people in
2011 recovered a weapon. Force was used by the police on young people in 22
percent of the stops. Force can range from the pointing of a gun to an
officer placing his or her hands on the young person. Force was
disproportionately used against black or Latino youth (23 percent) compared
to their white peers (15 percent). Most shocking is that 90 percent of all
stops of young people did not result in an arrest or a ticket — meaning that
in 131,087 of the stops, the young person being stopped was innocent of any
action that would constitute a crime or an infraction.

This experience on the street is only compounded by the experience that many
young people face in school. The N.Y.P.D. arrested or ticketed more than 15
students each day in public schools during the first three months of 2012.
More than 96 percent of the arrests were of black or Latino students. About
18 percent of the arrests were of students between the ages of 11 and 14.
Disorderly conduct, a catchall category that could encompass all kinds of
typical misbehavior, accounted for 71 percent of all summonses.

While we have plenty of data on the number of young people subjected to
N.Y.P.D. street stops, and on the number of young people stopped and frisked
who engaged in no wrongdoing, the data do not capture how being wrongfully
stopped and frisked affects the lives of young people... The Police
Department’s stop-and-frisk program requires thousands of innocent young
people of color to suffer repeatedly the indignities associated with routine
police stops and searches on public sidewalks. These stops breed distrust,
disaffection and anger, and these feelings subsequently must enter into the
classroom, affecting not only the individual student but the entire school
community....

The City Council has also introduced legislation to rein in stop-and-frisk
abuses, including by protecting New Yorkers against racial profiling by the
N.Y.P.D. and creating an N.Y.P.D. Inspector General’s Office. These reforms
will not only lead to better policing, but will also help close the
achievement gap.

__________

Graph from DNAinfo NY

__________

“Stop
and Frisk: The Stories Behind the Numbers” By Vince Warren, Huffington
Post, July 25, 2012

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that the New York City
Police Department (NYPD) stops and frisks well over a half a million New
Yorkers every year. You know that that are glaring racial disparities
in who gets stopped. You know that the courts are increasingly critical of
the practice, with one judge decrying the city's "deeply troubling apathy
towards New Yorkers' most fundamental constitutional rights." The issue has
been litigated in two successive court cases since 1999, last month 10,000
people marched down Fifth Avenue in silent protest, and even the New York
City Council is taking aim at curbing stop-and-frisk abuses through proposed legislation.

But unless you've been stopped yourself, or you live in city neighborhoods
where hundreds of people get stopped each day, you don't know what it's like
to live under these conditions. You don't know what it's like to walk around
feeling constantly targeted; when "you're a person of color; you already
'fit the description,'" as one man put it. You may not understand the
corrosive effect of living in neighborhoods that are described as "an
occupied zone" where residents feel "like you're in an outside prison," as
another described it. It's hard to comprehend what it's like to grow up and
be stopped regularly on your way to school or told by the cops you can't
play outside the building you live in. Or what it's like to walk by a school
and "see all these little kids lined up, with their legs spread, holding
[onto] the wall, and the cops are going through their pockets."

These stories and dozens of others have been collected and are being
released today in a first-of-its-kind report
that looks at the stories behind the stop-and-frisk numbers. "Stop and
Frisk: The Human Impact" was researched and written by the Center for
Constitutional Rights, the organization that has led the legal fight to end
unlawful stops, first in the Daniels v. City of New York case that brought
an end to the NYPD's infamous Street Crimes Unit and now in Floyd v. City of
New York, which is challenging the stop-and-frisk policy as racially
discriminatory and unconstitutional. The report is an intimate look into the
experience and devastating consequences of a practice that has upended the
lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. We wrote it because behind
every cold statistic logged in NYPD records there is a human being, and the
true toll this practice takes on our city cannot be understood without
hearing these stories.

A police stop in New York City is not a minor inconvenience. It is a
frightening and humiliating experience, one that more often than not leaves
people mistrustful of the police and changes their daily routines. Some are
physically abused or sexually harassed, but even stops that are not abusive
in these ways are inherently abusive of the spirit: "When they stop you on
the street, and then everybody's looking...it does degrade you," one woman
explained. People live in fear; they make sure to take ID with them, even if
they're just going out to walk the dog. They think twice about inviting
friends over, because their friends always get stopped on the way. "When the
police come around, I make sure to keep my head down," one 24-year old told
us. "I'm very cautious of where I go....at this point in my life, I take
transportation, literal transportation, like bus and train. I don't really
walk anymore."

Entire communities are targeted and feel targeted - Black and Latino men
above all, but also LGBTQ people, homeless and low-income people,
immigrants, religious minorities and youth. Residents in some neighborhoods
feel like they are living under siege. "There's this constant fear
that...police are going to intimidate and harass you," one of the people CCR
interviewed said. "Sitting on your porch or going to the store or like
having fun in your community -you don't really get to do that because you
have police presence in the street all the time."

Perhaps the most depressing quote we got during our research was this: "It's
so frequent, we don't even talk about it or complain about it. It's to be
expected."

This is what life has become for people in the supposedly greatest city in
the leading democracy of the world. It is more than just our citizens and
our neighborhoods that are under siege - our Constitution is under siege,
our humanity is under siege.

There is a growing movement that is fighting back,
through litigation, through legislation, through protest. "Stop and Frisk:
The Human Impact" reminds us all of what's at stake in this fight. You can
download a copy of the report here.

Stop and Frisk: The Human Impact: The Stories Behind The Numbers, The
Effects On Our Communities, Center for Constitutional Rights Report, July
2010

The summer of 2012 has not been kind to U.S. law enforcement officials. As
Occupy Wall Street protests subsided, the momentum shifted away from
America’s financial sector and toward the long simmering issue of
police-community relations.

Spurred on by the Trayvon Martin shooting, many citizens around the nation
redirected their protests and rallied against ‘illegal and unwarranted’
stops by the police. The Federal Court in New York City added more public
pressure by granting approval of a class-action suit brought against the
NYPD for “suspicionless stops and frisks.” The court’s approval of the suit
was bolstered by an American Civil Liberties Union study related to
stop-and-frisk data collected by the NYPD. The culmination of these
incidents has kept the stop-and-frisk on the public’s mind. While protests
increase nationwide, academics and media commentators from across the nation
have joined the debate....

[Long essay by current NYPD officer]

__________

from DNAinfo NY

“Stop-And-Frisk: Out Of
1,324 Local Searches At Sheepshead-Nostrand Houses, Zero Guns Are Found” By
Laura Vladimirova, Sheephead Bites, July 24, 2012

WNYC took it upon themselves to map all of the street stops – a.k.a.
stop and frisks – using information from the police department showcasing
where guns were recovered last year, since firearm control has been the
primary justification for the controversial tactic. The map reveals that, in
Sheepshead Bay, the NYPD has turned up no firearms in the areas in which
NYPD has concentrated its use of stop-and-frisk tactics.

In Sheepshead Bay, police made 1,324 stops in the
Sheepshead Bay-Nostrand Housing projects. Yet only two guns were found in
the 61st Precinct’s command, and neither were in the vicinity of the
projects....

An NYCLU analysis revealed that New Yorkers (mostly
black or Latino) have been subjected to police stops and street
interrogations more than 4 million times since 2002, and that nearly nine
out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers were innocent.

Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Michael
Bloomberg say that stop-and-frisk is meant to get illegal guns out of the
streets and criminals behind bars.

“You hear all the time from people who don’t like
stop-and-frisk. But you know what people really hate in New York City, and
always have? Guns,”
said Kelly.

Current data shows that out of 685,000 stops in
2011, about 770 guns were recovered. This means that only one tenth of one
percent of all stops resulted in cops finding a gun.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner
Raymond Kelly argue the main purpose of stop-and-frisk is to get guns off
the street. Out of more than 685,000 stops in 2011, about 770 guns were
recovered. That means about one tenth of one percent of all stops result in
the seizure of a gun.

But those guns are not showing up in the places
where the police are devoting the most stop-and-frisk resources.

Using data from the New York City police department,
WNYC mapped all street stops by police that resulted in the recovery of a
gun last year. The digital map shows an interesting pattern. We located all
the "hot spots" where stop and frisks are concentrated in the city, and
found that most guns were recovered on people outside those hot spots
meaning police aren't finding guns where they're looking the hardest.

__________

“What the Courts Say About
Stop-and-Frisk” By Ira Glasser, New York Times Letter, July 11, 2012

Courts Putting Stop-and-Frisk Policy on Trial (front
page, July 11) attributes the claim of unconstitutionality to ìrecent
rulings by federal and state courts.î But even aside from the racial
targeting of these frisks, the law has been clear for more than 40 years,
and New York City has been blatantly violating it.

Ever since a Supreme Court ruling in 1968,
reiterated a number of times over 25 years, the law regarding when police
officers are allowed to frisk has been clear: police may legally frisk
people only if they have a reasonable suspicion, based on articulable facts,
not a hunch, that the person frisked is armed and dangerous.

That the police rarely have legally adequate reason
to frisk is proved by the fact that their own statistics show that they find
guns as a result of such frisks in less than two-tenths of 1 percent of the
frisks ó more than 380,000 of them last year, more than 85 percent of them
blacks and Latinos. Either the police are spectacularly incompetent at
assessing reasonable suspicion, or they are frisking illegally.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has tried to rally public
support for this unconstitutional policy by claiming that it prevents crime,
but he provides no proof of this claim. How is crime prevented by violating
the rights of innocent people?

The writer is a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties
Union.

More than 2,000 people have already sent in stop-and-frisk videos using the
New York Civil Liberties Union’s (NYCLU) lauded smartphone application “Stop
and Frisk Watch.”

The free smartphone application was introduced nearly three weeks ago and
has already been making steady progress, although many of the videos sent in
are of people testing out the app, which has a “Shake to Send” feature built
in. Regardless, NYCLU Director of Communications Jennifer Carnig said the
NYLCU will be investigating the videos to look for signs of police
aggression during stop-and-frisks.

Telly Hudgins has been stopped and frisked by the police too many times to
count in the Brownsville, New York, public housing project where he lives.
One occasion sticks in his memory. "I had my pajamas on and my slippers on
and I'm emptying my garbage" at the trash chute. "They asked me for ID to
prove I lived there. Who walks around in their pajamas with ID?" asked the
black, 35-year-old counselor for the mentally handicapped. He says he
complained about the search and was issued a summons for disorderly
conduct....

For nearly two months the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy has drawn New York
City into an emotional debate about race, policing and Fourth Amendment
rights. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have
fiercely defended the program against an onslaught of criticism from judges,
civil rights leaders and a vocal block of Democratic politicians. It has
become a defining issue for next year's mayoral election.

For Bloomberg, an independent who will be stepping down next year after
three terms, the question is central to his legacy. Having presided over an
historic reduction in violent crime, he boasts that New York is "America's
safest city by far," a place where tourists and residents can safely roam
any neighborhood, even those traditionally considered dangerous, by day and
most by night.

WHAT PRICE SAFETY?

Critics, though, charge that this has come at a precious cost - the civil
liberties of hundreds of thousands who are stopped and searched each year.
Police stops in New York City have climbed steadily to more than 685,000
last year from nearly 161,000 in 2003. Only 12 percent of those stopped were
arrested or ticketed. More than 85 percent were black or Hispanic, while
they make up 51 percent of the city's population.

A Reuters analysis of more than 3 million stops from 2006 through 2011 shows
that by far the densest concentrations fell in areas of public housing, home
to many of the city's poorest families and where 90 percent of residents are
black or Hispanic. Although one would expect a heavy concentration of police
stops in these densely populated areas, the stop rate is disproportionate:
In 2011, police stopped people in these areas at a rate more than three
times higher than elsewhere in the city, the analysis found.

Amid recent noise about New York City's controversial "stop and frisk"
policy, Reuters had done a deep dive into five years of worth of police data
to see where (and to whom) the vast majority of searches take place.
Unsurprisingly, police concentrate their efforts in the neighborhoods with
the highest crime rates — which also happen to be the neighborhoods with
the poorest and largely minority residents. Yet, even accounting for the
excess violence in those areas, streets stops far outweigh the average for
other neighborhoods.

For example, Precinct 73 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, saw the second highest
rate of violent crime in the city last year, with 14.1 violent crimes per
1,000 residents. The more affluent Park Slope has one of the lowest, at 4.1
crimes per 1,000 residents. That's a rate about three times lower than the
rate in Brownsville. Yet, the rate of stops in Brownsville was 572 per 1,000
residents, which is 16 times higher than the rate in Park Slope.

The stops also tend to be heavily concentrated in public housing projects,
even inside the buildings themselves, where police patrols include walking
the floors and stairwells. Many residents (who are much poorer than the
average New Yorker and overwhelmingly black and Latino) approve of the added
police presence, but others complain about being harassed by cops simply for
taking out the garbage. Having police so closely monitoring your home
creates a dangerous level of animosity between cops and the people they are
there to protect. Since some of the Brownsville are kids and old people who
almost never get stopped, that aggressively high rate means most young,
black men in the area are stopped several times a year. And arrests often
meaning handcuffing and hauling away people in front of their families.

Re
“Rude or Polite, City’s Officers Leave Raw Feelings in Stops” (front page,
June 27): The term “stop and frisk” rolls off the tongue with such ease that
we often forget the fact that a stop does not justify a frisk.

To stop a person lawfully, a police officer must have reasonable suspicion
that the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit an
unlawful act. Then, even if a stop is appropriate, officers can conduct a
frisk only in the rare circumstance when they reasonably suspect that a
person has a weapon that might endanger officer safety.

Despite this limitation, nearly 56 percent of those stopped by the New
York Police Department in 2011 were frisked. Those frisks produced a weapon
less than 2 percent of the time. These statistics clearly show that the
N.Y.P.D. routinely frisks people without legal justification. How else to
explain the huge number of innocent and unarmed people frisked?

Used lawfully, street stops are an acceptable law enforcement tool. But
the N.Y.P.D.’s rampant abuse of the tactic, courteous or not, is an
unconstitutional violation of civil rights that sows mistrust between the
police and the public they serve.

Most
of the time, the officers swoop in, hornetlike, with a command to stop: “Yo!
You, come here. Get against the wall.” They batter away with questions,
sometimes laced with profanity, racial slurs and insults: “Where’s the
weed?” “Where’s the guns?” The officers tell those who ask why they have
been stopped to shut up, using names like immigrant, old man or “bro.”
Next comes the frisk, the rummaging through pockets and backpacks. Then they
are gone.

Other times, the officers are polite, their introductions almost gentle.
“Hey, how’s it going?” “Can you step over here, sir?” “We’d like to talk to
you.” The questions are probing, authoritative, but less accusatory. “What
are you doing here?” “Do you live here?” “Can I see some identification,
please?” During the pat-down, they ask, “Do you have anything on you?” They
nudge further: “You don’t mind if I search you, do you?” They explain that
someone of a matching description robbed a store a few days ago, or that the
stop is a random one, part of a program in a high-crime area. Then they
apologize for the stop and say the person is free to go.

In
interviews with 100 people who said they had been stopped by the New York
police in neighborhoods where the practice is most common, many said the
experience left them feeling intruded upon and humiliated. And even when
officers extended niceties, like “Have a nice night,” or called them “sir”
and “ma’am,” people said they questioned whether the officer was being
genuine.

Michael Delgado, 18, said he was last stopped on Grant Street in East New
York, Brooklyn. “I was walking, and a cop said, ‘Where’s the weed?’ ” he
recalled. “In my mind, I’m like, ‘Yo, this guy’s a racist.’ He started
frisking me, his hands were in my pockets, but I didn’t say anything because
my mom always tells me: ‘No altercations. Let him do his thing.’ ” When the
stop-and-frisk was done, Mr. Delgado said, the officer left him with a
casual aside to stay safe. “Stay safe?” Mr. Delgado said. “After he just
did all that?”

Last
year, city police officers stopped nearly 686,000 people, 84 percent of them
black or Latino. The vast majority — 88 percent of the stops — led to
neither an arrest nor a summons, although officers said they had enough
reasonable suspicion to conduct a frisk in roughly half of the total stops,
according to statistics provided by the New York Police Department and the
Center for Constitutional Rights. Behind each number is a singular and
salient interaction between the officers and the person they have stopped.
In conducting the interviews, The New York Times sought to explore the
simple architecture of the stops — the officers’ words and gestures,
actions, explanations, tones of voice and demeanors.

What
seems clear is that there is no script for the encounters, or that if there
is one, it is not being followed. Under the law, officers must have a
reasonable suspicion — a belief that a crime is afoot — to stop, question
and frisk people. One thing an officer cannot do is stop someone based
solely on skin color. Yet many of those interviewed said they believed that
officers had stopped them because of race — and race alone. Al Blount, a
minister at a Harlem church, said he had been pulled over. “They’ll ask,
‘Where are you headed?’ When you’re African-American, you have to have a
definite destination. Everyone else can just say, ‘Mind your own business.’
” Last month, a federal judge granted class-action status to a lawsuit
alleging that the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics systematically
violated the constitutional rights of blacks and Latinos, who say they are
singled out for stops....

The
informal street survey, conducted over the past two weeks, sought to get at
the root of an angry groundswell against the police among residents in
predominantly minority and poor neighborhoods.

The
interviews consisted of five questions: When and where were you stopped?
What was the first thing the police officer said to you? How did the officer
address you? Did the officer ever explain why he or she had stopped you?
What was the last thing the officer said to you?

The
answers offered a glimpse into the experience and why it often leaves such a
bitter taste in the mouths of so many who have been stopped, and raised
questions about whether the Police Department’s new emphasis on courtesy and
respect would help mend relationships in predominantly minority
neighborhoods. While the encounter is often brief, the impression can be
long-lasting.

“I
understand that they might need to be aggressive with some people, but you
just feel it,” said Christopher A. Chadwick, 20, a college student from
Brooklyn. “They talk to you like you’re ignorant, like you’re an animal.”
Mr. Chadwick described a stop that began when an officer said: “You, come
here. Show me your ID.” Cruz Calixto, 48, said the foot-patrol officers who
approached him last summer as he walked down Rockaway Boulevard in Queens
were mild-mannered. “ ‘Can you step over here sir? We’d like to talk to
you,’ ” Mr. Calixto recounted. Still, the encounter was degrading. “It makes
you feel belittled,” he said....

The
department recently distributed
thousands of wallet-size cards —
labeled “What Is A Stop, Question and Frisk Encounter?” — to precincts
across the city. Officers have been encouraged to give the cards to people
they have stopped; at the bottom of the card is essentially a one-sentence,
conditional apology: “If you have been stopped and were not involved in any
criminal activity, the
N.Y.P.D. regrets any
inconvenience.”

Of
the people interviewed, only one, Derrick Smith, said that officers had
provided the card — in an exchange witnessed by The Times. Mr. Smith, 47,
had been stopped as he emerged from the subway in East New York. He said the
officers told him they had seen a suspicious bulge in his shirt. “I had to
lift my shirt; I was coming home from work,” Mr. Smith said. “It was just my
cellphone.” As Mr. Smith spoke with reporters, the officers returned to hand
him one of the cards. Many of those interviewed said that they resented
being stopped, but that the officers’ demeanor made the experience far
worse.

On
an evening about a month ago, while walking with friends on Northern
Boulevard near 78th Street, in Queens, Louis Morales, 15, and Alex Mejia,
16, found themselves swarmed by plainclothes narcotics officers. They shoved
the teenagers’ palms onto an unmarked police car and searched them. Spewing
expletives, the officers repeatedly ordered them to “shut up,” the teenagers
said. One of the officers, Mr. Morales said, warned: “Say one word and I’m
going to make your parents pick you up at the jail. You guys are a bunch of
immigrants.” “Yep, that’s what they said, ‘You guys are immigrants,’ ” Mr.
Mejia interjected. “We can’t say anything to them. They curse at us. They
treat us like we killed somebody.” Mr. Morales said he and other
neighborhood teenagers had become so bitter that even if they had
information about a crime, they would not share it with the police. “I’m not
going to help them,” he said. “They are not helping me by disrespecting me.”

Most
of those interviewed said they could not remember the exact date and time
when they were stopped and only six or seven said they knew the name of the
officers involved. The sentiment, however, was clearer.

On a
recent early evening in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Eric Togar said, he was on
his way to meet his wife and her younger brother in front of the Langston
Hughes Houses, where a cream-colored stretch limousine was on its way to
take Mr. Togar’s teenage brother-in-law to a prom. The police cruiser pulled
up, with lights activated, and two officers jumped out. The officers asked
if he was wanted on a warrant, said Mr. Togar, 45, a computer technician.
They asked to see identification and what was inside the red backpack slung
over his shoulder. “Computers and tablets,” he told them. Mr. Togar said
they patted him down, offering no explanation, then told him he could go.
Mr. Togar almost missed the prom send-off. “They’re supposed to serve and
protect, but all they do is patrol and control,” Mr. Togar said. “Walking
down the street doesn’t make you a criminal.”

Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New
York Times"They just rude.
Sometimes they curse but not most of the time. ‘Do you live here?
Got
drugs? Got anything?’ Sometimes they just leave, sometimes they say
'sorry'."
- Evan Guzman, 18, East New York, Brooklyn

Yesterday the NYPD loaded reporters onto a bus and drove them up to the
Bronx to view their updated stop-and-frisk training program at the
department's Rodman's Neck facility... The combination of cloying overtures
from the famously brusque NYPD press officers with a training facility that
resembled a movie set made the entire experience feel like a Hollywood
B-movie, Field Trip: Stop & Frisk. The surreality ended at the press
conference, which followed the live-action demonstrations of three
stop-and-frisk scenarios that 1,300 "high-impact" officers (those most
likely to conduct stops) have completed since April, and are now required
for new recruits.

Two of the scenarios involved radio calls, the other a domestic disturbance.
Weren't more than half of the 601,055 stops conducted last year for "furtive
movements?" Why not incorporate those? "I think that everything you saw was
realistic," Dr. James O'Keefe, Deputy Commissioner of Training said.... Also
detracting from the scenarios' realism: the only man actually detained was
white, and the officers assigned to performing the stops were seasoned
detectives, not officers feeling their way through the exercise. There would
be no learning curve, no adjustment of techniques. These two were perfect.

We asked if the new training incorporated Commissioner Kelly's order in
September to stop arresting citizens (mostly young men of color) who are
essentially tricked into bringing small amounts of marijuana into public
view—turning violations into misdemeanors—during stop-and-frisks. "That's
not currently part of the training," O'Keefe said.

Deputy Commissioner for Public Information Paul Browne asked Inspector Kerry
Sweet, the executive officer of the NYPD's Legal Bureau to chime in. "We
enforce the law as it is," Sweet said, as another six people were arrested
for marijuana possession. "If there are legislative changes, we will address
the changes."

___________

“Video: How Do Real Stop & Frisks Compare To NYPD
Training Simulations?” By Christopher Robbins. Gothamist, June 21, 2012
[posting of a number of videos by Jazz Hayden showing stop and frisks]

Beneath the sounds of birds and children playing in Central Park, thousands
marched quietly down Manhattan’s 5th avenue on Sunday afternoon carrying
signs bearing the faces of a decade of victims of police violence and the
words “Stop Racial Profiling: End Stop and Frisk.” Contingents from nearly
300 groups including labor unions, community groups, national civil rights
organizations as well as the unaffiliated gathered in Harlem and marched
past khaki-clad upper east siders walking their poodles, to the home of
Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Their demand? An end to racial profiling and in
particular to the cops’ use of stop-and-frisk, a practice marchers say has
terrorized communities of color for more than a decade.

“You
can’t do something like this that many times to that many people for that
long and not have this kind of march,” said Carlos, a 39-year-old African
American man who joined the march after hearing Reverend Al Sharpton talk
about it on his radio show. Carlos told Colorlines.com that in the 12 years
since he moved from Florida to Harlem for a job as an electrical engineer,
“I’ve been stopped more than 50 times while walking down the street. It’s
gotten so ridiculously out of control to the point where Bloomberg’s guys
are stopping everyone.”

The
Father’s Day march was the most public display of outrage against the
stop-and-frisk policy to date. The cops conducted nearly 700,000 searches
last year alone. March leaders included national civil rights figures
including Sharpton and NAACP President Ben Jealous who marched with the
family of Ramarley Graham, a young man recently killed by New York City
cops. Marchers included the field of Democratic mayoral hopefuls and a
diverse coalition from across New York.

As
the 2013 election inches closer and Democratic mayoral hopefuls scramble to
differentiate themselves from the pack, years of police reform organizing
has succeeded in pushing police accountability issues to the center of the
race. It’s a movement that’s been long in the making and is now comprised of
what some advocates say is an unprecedented coalition of city
constituencies.

The Data Doesn’t Lie

The
stop-and-frisk program has been the central issue in the fight for greater
checks on the cops, largely because the numbers so starkly reveal a problem.
New data has born out the reality on the street for hundreds of thousands of
black and Latino men. Though the police tactic is now a decade and half old,
started by Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the program that the police call “stop,
question and frisk” exploded under the command of Mayor Bloomberg and his
police commissioner Raymond Kelly. In 2002, Bloomberg’s first year as mayor,
the NYPD conducted just under 100,000 of these searches on city streets and
in subway stations and public housing complexes. In 2011, Bloomberg’s NYPD
conducted 680,000 stops, 87 percent of whom were black and Latino men. In
all, among black men and teens between 14 to 24, the total number of
searches in 2011 was greater than their total population in the city.

“Every person of color in the city knew these numbers before they came out,”
said Djibril Toure, an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement,
which works in communities of color against police brutality. “But the
numbers made it impossible for the rest the city not to see, too.”

New
York’s mayor and police commissioner say that the stop-and-frisk program is
responsible for a rapid decline in crime in New York City. In a speech last
week at a predominantly black church in Brooklyn, Bloomberg said “We are not
going to walk away from a strategy that we know saves lives.”

But
there’s no evidence that the tactic is responsible for falling crime in the
city. Meanwhile, the corrosive fallout in communities of color is palpable.
“It’s gotten to the point where nobody can trust the cops anymore,” said
Carlos, the marcher who would not share his last name. “It’s gotten to the
point where I hate the cops, where I want to do something to them because
they’ve done this to me so many times.”

[Long article describes the history of attention to and activity around stop
and frisks in NY City]

In a slow, somber procession, several thousand demonstrators
conducted a silent march on Sunday down Fifth Avenue to protest the New York
Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policies, which the organizers say single
out minority groups and create an atmosphere of martial law for the city’s
black and Latino residents....

The presence of several elected officials at the march, including the
Democratic mayoral hopefuls Bill de Blasio, the public advocate; Christine
C. Quinn, the City Council speaker; Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough
president; and William C. Thompson, the former city comptroller, seemed to
signal a solidifying opposition to the policy, which has long been opposed
by civil rights groups.
Wade Cummings, 46, a teacher, attended with his 19-year-old son, Tarik. Both
said they had been stopped by police officers — once for the father, three
times for the son.

“I’m concerned about him being stopped and it escalating,” the father said.
“I like to believe I taught him not to escalate this situation, but you
never know how it’s going to go down.”
Police officers stopped nearly 700,000 people last year, 87 percent of them
black or Latino. Of those stopped, more than half were also frisked....

Demonstrators mostly adhered to the organizers’ call to march in silence,
hushing talkers along the route. Members of labor unions and the N.A.A.C.P.
appeared to predominate, but there were also student groups, Occupy Wall
Street, Common Cause, the Universal Zulu Nation and the Answer Coalition. A
group of Quakers carried a banner criticizing the stop-and-frisk practice;
other signs read, “Skin Color Is Not Reasonable Suspicion” and “Stop &
Frisk: The New Jim Crow.”

As of Friday, 299 organizations had endorsed the march, including unions,
religious groups and Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arab, and Jewish groups. The
turnout reflected the growing alliance between civil rights groups and gay
and lesbian activists, who in past years have often kept each other at arm’s
length. Last month, the board of the N.A.A.C.P., which includes several
church leaders, voted to endorse same-sex marriage. The roster of support
for the march on Sunday included at least 28 gay, lesbian and transgender
groups....

The idea for the demonstration took root three months ago in Selma, Ala.,
after a commemoration of the 1965 civil rights march there, said Benjamin
Todd Jealous, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., who met there with the Rev.
Al Sharpton and George Gresham, president of 1199 S.E.I.U. United Healthcare
Workers East.... “Stop-and-frisk is a political tool, victimizing one group
of people so another group feels protected,” Mr. Jealous said. “It’s
humiliating hundreds of thousands of people.” According to a report by the
New York Civil Liberties Union, during the 10 years of the Bloomberg
administration, the police have performed 4,356,927 stops, including 685,724
last year. Among African-American males ages 14 to 24, the number of stops
last year was greater than their total population.

One man who held a sign that read “Stop Racial Profiling” said he came to
Central Park to relax but decided to join the march because of his own
experiences with the police.
“It happened to me about 10 times,” said the man, Bruce Fitzgerald, 48, of
the Bronx.

Seeking a contrast to some recent Occupy Wall Street demonstrations,
organizers called for a disciplined, orderly march, with no clashes with the
police. Though protesters did not have a permit, organizers said that their
talks with the police had been cordial and cooperative, and that they did
not expect conflict.

“This policy did not emanate from the rank-and-file police officers, and
we’re not protesting them,” said Mr. Gresham, who was arrested at an Occupy
protest in November. “We’re not going to the police commissioner’s home.
We’re going to the mayor’s home, because he is the guardian of New York.”

“If you’ve done nothing wrong, you deserve nothing but respect and courtesy
from the police,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Police Commissioner Kelly and I both
believe we can do a better job in this area — and he’s instituted a number
of reforms to do that.”

At the end of the march, Mr. Jealous, who walked with his 6-year-old
daughter, Morgan, on his shoulders, said the silence conveyed the
seriousness of the demonstrators.
“In this city of so much hustle and bustle and clamor, sometimes the loudest
thing you can do is move together in silence,” he said.

The skyrocketing numbers
of NYPD stop-and-frisks had little impact on the number of people shot in
New York City or on gun violence in general during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s
administration, a DNAinfo.com New York analysis of crime data has found.

While the NYPD was
stopping and frisking a record 685,724 people last year, 1,821 people were
victims of gunfire, according to NYPD and city statistics. That's virtually
the same number as in 2002, Bloomberg's first year in office, when 1,892
people were shot, but just 97,296 people were frisked.

The year before, there
were 1,845 shootings with a similar number of frisks.

"If you have a flat-line
situation with shootings, and the stops are this high, you are throwing
everyone up against the wall and you are losing the community, then you have
to reassess," a former top NYPD official told "On the Inside."

"We are not a militia, but a police organization
serving a community," the ex-cop continued. "We don’t want to be seen as an
occupying army. We need the large majority of the community to be involved
with us."

Between 2009 and 2011, the number of people shot in
New York climbed from 1,727 to 1,821 even as the NYPD was ratcheting up the
number of people it rousted from 510,742 in 2009 to the record 685,724, the
statistics showed.

A similar pattern of rising shootings and escalating
stop-and-frisks occurred from 2004 through 2006. During those years, the
NYPD stop-and-frisks jumped 70 percent, from 313,523 to 506,491, but the
number of shooting victims rose about 7 percent, from 1,777 to 1,880.

During Bloomberg’s first five years in office, the
number of stops and frisks went up five fold, from 97,296 in 2002 to 506,491
in 2006. But the numbers of shootings and victims — 1,556 and 1,880,
respectively — remained about the same since he and Kelly started.

Perhaps that helps explain why the NYPD kept the
stop-and-frisk numbers a secret until February 2007 when they finally handed
them over to the City Council, even though it was required following the
1999 fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo.

To be sure, part of the rise in stop-and-frisks is
due to cops getting better at reporting the encounters. But this in no way
explains away a seven-fold jump in 10 years.

One in five people stopped last year by the New York City police department
was a teenager between the ages of 14 and 18, according to a WNYC analysis
of recently released police data.

Eighty-six percent of those teenagers who were stopped were either black or
Latino, most of them boys.

Last year, there were
more than 120,000 stops of black and Latino kids between 14 and 18. The
total number of black and Latino boys that age in the entire city isn’t much
more than that – about 177,000 – which strongly suggests a teen male with
dark skin in New York City will probably get stopped and frisked by the time
he’s graduated from high school.

The debate about stop and
frisk’s racial disparities comes down to opponents who say it racially
profiles and supporters who say the people stopped fit the descriptions of
most suspects. The conversation, until now, has been dominated by lawyers,
politicians, police officials and community leaders.

But ask junior high and
high school students around the city, from affluent to low-income
neighborhoods, and most appear to agree on one main premise: who gets
stopped and frisked has everything to do with where you live and what color
your skin is.

A Tale of Two Cities

Last year, the NYPD stopped teenagers more than 140,000 times.

But at Stuyvesant High
School in Lower Manhattan, which is 96 percent Asian and white, you would be
hard pressed to find even one kid among the 3,300 students who has ever been
stopped and frisked.

The students here, at one
of the city’s most elite public high schools, are known to excel at
academics. They are the eager students, the ones who raise their hands in
class. But ask them how many of them have ever been stopped and frisked by
police, and what you get back is a sea of blank stares....

Cross over to Brownsville,
Brooklyn, where there aren’t many skinny white kids, and the story of stop
and frisk suddenly becomes “A Tale of Two Cities.”

Photo: Malik
Small, 14, (left) said he has been stopped four times by police. Tyari
Jenkins, 14, (right) is an eighth grader at Teachers Preparatory High School
in Browsville. Since getting stopped for the first time when he was 12,
Tyari has wanted to become a criminal defense lawyer. Ailsa
Chang/WNYC)

The demographics of
Teachers Preparatory High School in Brownsville are 99 percent black and
Latino. It takes only five minutes to find a group of 14-year olds here who
say they have been stopped by police two, three, even seven times....

In this area alone, kids
between 14 and 18 made up more than 2,700 of the nearly 8,000 people stopped
by police in 2011. Within a three-block radius around Stuyvesant High School
in Manhattan, police stopped teens 7 times last year.

Tyari Jenkins, a
14-year-old African-American student at Teachers Preparatory High School,
said he has been stopped and frisked three times.

The first time was as a
12-year-old, when he was barely five feet tall, he said. He had been walking
out of his home to his friend’s house across the street.

“When I looked up, I see
the cop. He was like, ‘You,’ and I was like, ‘Me?’ He said, ‘Yeah,’” Tyari
recalled. “He said, ‘Empty your book bag,’ and I was like, ‘Okay,’
and I was taking my time. Then he said, ‘You need to hurry up.’ And he
started emptying my book bag and dropped my stuff on the ground.”

The officers asked for an
ID. Tyari said he left his at home, so the officers hauled him back home
across the street and asked his mother to identify him. After a few minutes,
they left.

Tyari said he’s never been
arrested for anything. Neither have any of the other Brownsville kids who
shared their stories. They are now 14 years old, and all of them have been
stopped by police between two and seven times.

This
month, a federal judge in New York dealt a blow to “stop-and-frisk,” a
policy that resulted in 685,000 recorded police stops in 2011. Eighty-five
percent of those stopped were African American and Latino, mostly youths.
US district judge Shira Scheindlin granted class-action certification to a
stop-and-frisk lawsuit against the city of New York... The plaintiffs allege
that the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy regularly violates the Constitution by
illegally stopping and searching scores of people belonging to a particular
demographic -- black and Latino....

The
class-action ruling will put stop-and-frisk on trial. Plaintiffs in Floyd
et al. vs City of New York also argue that they were stopped by police who
did not have the legally necessary "reasonable suspicion" that they had
committed or were going to commit a crime. What's more, the suit alleges,
police often performed frisks, but not because they saw a bulge they
suspected to be a weapon, another legal requirement.

In
her written decision, Scheindlin said the alleged constitutional violations
result not from the actions of rogue officers, but from a policy handed down
from the very top. "The stop-and-frisk program is centralized and
hierarchical," said Scheindlin, "Those stops were made pursuant to a policy
that is designed, implemented and monitored by the NYPD's administration."
Scheindlin's ruling cites "overwhelming evidence" -- a spike in
stop-and-frisks and the NYPD's own words -- indicating that at the "highest
levels of the department," police are enforcing a policy that leaves behind
a trail of daily injustices.

For
years, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly have used distortions
and misinformation to promote and justify a policy that violates the
constitutional rights of those who were stopped. Now, the Scheindlin
findings have exposed the NYPD game for what it is, an illegal system of
quotas and racial profiling imposed on field police from the top of the
NYPD.

"Suspicionless stops should never occur," Scheindlin wrote in her decision,
adding that, "Defendants' cavalier attitude towards the prospect of
a'"widespread practice of suspicionless stops' displays a deeply troubling
apathy towards New Yorkers' most fundamental constitutional rights."
Stop-and-frisk, which the data shows is a form of racial profiling, violates
not only the Fourth Amendment -- protection from unreasonable searches --
but also the 14th Amendment, which includes the equal protection clause, the
plaintiffs charge.

The
Scheindlin decision was informative and comprehensive, including a number of
important facts and observations. Here are eight important points from the
decision.

1.
Soaring numbers. The rate of stops has grown exponentially under the
Bloomberg administration...

2. No
reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion that a person is involved in a
crime is necessary for a legal stop. Eighty-eight percent of those stopped,
however, are not charged with any crime. As Scheindlin noted, the data shows
that "according to their own records and judgment, officers' 'suspicion' was
wrong nearly nine times out of ten."

3.
Imaginary bulges.... A "suspicious bulge" was cited as a reason for about 10
percent of all [685,000] stops, but guns were seized in less than 1 percent.
"For every 69 stops that police officers justified specifically on the basis
of a suspicious bulge, they found one gun," the decision notes.

4.
Stops for no reason. "Overall, in more than half a million documented stops
-- 18.4 percent of the total -- officers listed no coherent suspected
crime," Scheindlin wrote...

5.
Unlawful stops. "According to their own explanations for their actions, NYPD
officers conducted at least 170,000 unlawful stops between 2004 and 2009,"
Scheindlin wrote. Stops based on nothing more than "furtive movement" or a
"high-crime area" were the justifications of at least 100,000 stops, but as
Scheindlin says, [ such stops] are illegal due to the Fourth Amendment law
protecting Americans from unreasonable searches.

6.
Racial profiling. The NYPD's stop-and-frisk program targets blacks and
Latinos because of their skin color. Scheindlin admitted the testimony of
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Fagan, who found that police stopped
blacks and Latinos far more than white residents. Isolated from other
factors like crime rates and neighborhood racial composition, racial
disparity from racial targeting was statistically significant, strongly
underscoring that skin color is the essential factor in determining who gets
stopped...

Fagan's research also found that "the search for weapons is (a) unrelated to
crime (b) takes place primarily where weapons offenses are less frequent
than other crimes, and (c) is targeted at places where the black and
Hispanic populations are highest." Cops are more likely to list no suspected
crime category, or what Scheindlin called "an incoherent one," like "furtive
movements," when stopping blacks and Latinos than when stopping whites. They
are also more likely to use force against people of color.

7.
NYPD illegal quotas. Scheindlin links the rising number of stops and the
targeting of black and Latinos to NYPD quotas, and to Commissioner Kelly's
own admission that the NYPD has a quota policy, albeit disguised.... Former
NYPD officers turned whistleblowers Adil Polanco and Adrian Schoolcraft have
collected evidence documenting NYPD quotas in practice. From 2008 to 2009,
Polanco, from the 41st Precinct, and Schoolcraft, from the 81st, recorded
roll calls revealing supervisors' and other high-ranking officers'
enforcement of quotas. In Scheindlin's own words, Schoolcraft's audio files
expose supervisors "repeatedly telling officers to conduct unlawful stops
and arrests and explaining that the instructions for higher performance
numbers are coming down the chain of command."

Similarly, Polanco testified that "his commanding officers announced
specific quotas for arrests and summons (quotas that rose dramatically
between early 2008 and 2009) and for UF-250s" (a term for the forms used in
stops), said Scheindlin, "and threatened overtime and undesirable
assignments for those who failed to meet them."

STOP WATCH
NYC MAP OF 670,000 RECORDED STOP AND FRISKS IN NEW YORK CITY IN 2011

click on the map to go to the intereactive
version where you can put in an address.

Alarmed by legal sanctions
that allow police to stop and search individuals -- mostly persons of color
-- in public places, the NAACP is holding a "Silent March Against Stop and
Frisk" on Father's Day. The march, supported by the National Council of
Churches and other faith, labor and civic groups, will begin at 1 p.m. June
17 at 110th Street between 5th Avenue and Lenox.

"The arbitrary stopping and
frisking of anyone -- especially persons of color -- is reminiscent of
discredited police tactics of another era," said the Rev. Michael
Livingston, director of the National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative
and staff to the Council's Racial Justice Working Group.... Judith Roberts,
director for Racial Justice Ministries, Congregational and Synodical
Mission, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said the NCC Racial
Justice Working Group is "focusing a great deal of attention on criminal
justice in 2012." "We recognize that people of color in the United States
are disproportionately impacted by unequal sentencing laws, racial profiling
and institutional racism within our criminal justice system," Roberts said.
"As people of faith, we are called to stand up against injustice."

Organizers of the march
said, "People of color should not be afraid to walk down the street in their
own city. On June 17th, we will proudly walk with them to assert that right.
Like thousands of activists before us, we will channel the power of our
silence to bring public attention to the use of racial profiling by the New
York Police Department."

According to organizers,
the tradition of silent marches for civil rights dates back to 1917, when
the then 8-year-old NAACP held the first one in New York City to protest
lynchings, segregation and race riots in the South. That march, led by NAACP
founder W. E. B. DuBois, was the NAACP's first major public protest, and the
power demonstrated by thousands of people marching silently through the
streets of New York became an iconic symbol of strength in the face of
injustice. "Silence is a powerful force that, like other forms of
non-violent protest, holds a mirror to the brutality of one's opponents."
say the organizers. "On June 17, we will hold up a mirror to New York City's
stop-and-frisk policy. It is not only discriminatory, it actively seeks to
humiliate innocent citizens—particularly African American and Latino men—and
criminalize otherwise legal behavior.

The NAACP, Health Care Workers Union 1199, the
NYCLU,
elected officials and many others call a rally for
Father's Day, 2012

To
listen to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly — and their
hallelujah chorus on the editorial boards of The Daily News and The New York
Post — is to hear the same sad argument:

Our
victory over crime is so tenuous that only the mass stopping and frisking of
black and Latino men keeps a sea-tide of violence at bay. Two weeks ago,
Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of United States District Court declared this
argument flatly unconstitutional. She found “overwhelming evidence” that top
brass had put in place “a centralized stop-and-frisk program that has led to
thousands of unlawful stops.”

The
department’s lawyers argued that stopping and frisking was a time-honored
“social institution.” The judge batted down that argument, too.

Stopping and frisking, done properly, is useful and legal. Officers can stop
someone when they have reason to suspect that a crime has taken place or is
about to take place. But that police favorite, “furtive movement”? No such
legal animal exists.

This
is not just a fine point harped upon by federal judges. In the last few
weeks I interviewed two officers in Bushwick who insisted that current
policy required them to trespass across clear constitutional lines.

“You
can’t catch innocent young men in your nets and just say, ‘Oh, that’s all
right, I’m fighting crime,’ ” a veteran officer said. “You have to follow
the law.”

Judge
Scheindlin was withering on this question. She noted that many stops were
illegal on their face and that even “according to their own records and
judgment, officers’ ‘suspicion’ was wrong nearly 9 times out of 10.”

Last
week, two police officers told me several colleagues were in heavily
attended remedial classes for those who fail to record enough stops and
arrests. “They want five arrests a month for marijuana for some units,”
he said. “If you can do that, you either have X-ray vision or you are
breaking the law.”

In 2001,
then-former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told Time magazine that when his
successor claimed responsibility for falling crime rates, it was “like
trying to take credit for an eclipse.”

More than a
decade later, this same Ray Kelly, now in his second stint as NYPD
commissioner, defends his over-the-top stop-and-frisk program as responsible
for a plummeting murder rate.... This is demonstrably false.... In
fact, the city’s murder rate started dropping long before Kelly’s current
tenure as commissioner, and there’s no evidence stop-and-frisk had anything
to do with it.... By 2001, the year before Bloomberg hired Kelly, the
number of murders had dropped to 649. That total fell to 587 in 2002, the
year before the commissioner initiated his aggressive stop-and-frisk
regime. From 2003 to 2011, a period that saw a 600% increase in street
stops (from 97,296 to 685,724), there’s been an average of 544 murders per
year. That amounts to about 430 fewer murders since the commissioner took
office — a far cry from his claim of 5,600 saved lives. Sounds a little like
taking credit for an eclipse....

At bottom, the
NYPD’s stop-and-frisk regime represents a civil rights violation — one that
disproportionally targets young black and Latino men. Though they make up
only 4.7% of the city’s population, black and Latino males between the ages
of 14 and 24 accounted for 41.6% of stops in 2011. The number of stops of
young black men exceeded the city’s entire population of young black men.

The commissioner
contends that this happens only because officers go where the crime is. But
last year, large percentages of blacks and Latinos were also stopped in
overwhelmingly white neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, where 77% of
people stopped were black or Latino.

What’s more,
“violent crime suspected” was a justification listed for only 10.5% of
street stops in 2011. By far the most common reason listed was “furtive
movement,” a catchall term that apparently applies to a wide assortment of
innocent behavior.

Discriminatory
policing corrodes trust between police and communities, making everyone less
safe. But don’t take my word for it. Again, listen to the old Ray Kelly,
this time in 2000: “[A] large reservoir of good will was under construction
when I left the Police Department in 1994. It was called community policing.
But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious
stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community distrust.”
Sadly, the commissioner has changed his tune.

Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the New York Police
Department issued a weak statement last week on efforts to “increase public
confidence” in the city’s abusive stop-and-frisk program, which ensnares
hundreds of thousands of mainly minority New Yorkers every year. Mr. Kelly
seems to believe that tinkering at the margins will cure the program’s
constitutional flaws. It will not....

The implication in Mr. Kelly’s letter is that
street-level officers are refusing to follow proper policy and are
responsible for a growing number of illegal stops made without objective
“reasonable suspicion,” as required by law.

But Judge Shira Scheindlin of Federal District Court demolished that
argument last week in a ruling granting class-action status to a lawsuit
filed against the department. She found the problem was the command
structure itself and “the department’s policy of establishing performance
standards and demanding increased levels of stops and frisks.” Stops
increased from under 100,000 in 2002 to nearly 700,000 last year.

By pointing out the vague and unlawful criteria used to justify stops in New
York, the court decision suggested a kind of road map to reform. In tens of
thousands of cases, for example, officers reported “furtive movement.” They
reported that other stops had taken place in “high crime areas,” when, in
fact, some had not. And, in more than 10 percent of all stops, officers
reported a “suspicious bulge” — suggesting a gun — in the clothing of people
they stopped, but seized guns only 0.15 percent of the time. New York needs
to stop these practices, which may have infected Philadelphia’s program.

City Councilman Jumaane Williams thinks Mayor
Michael Bloomberg's administration is "ass-backwards" in its approach to gun
violence, and that the mayor and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly are wrong to
continue the "racist official policy" of NYPD stop and frisks.

Williams, who has been one of stop and frisk's most
outspoken critics, told The Huffington Post Monday that he saw a "glimmer of
hope" in Kelly's announcement last week that the department would be making
some changes to the controversial program. Williams added, however, that
"none of it was substantial reform."...

In February, Williams launched a legislative effort
aiming to increase NYPD accountability, including a measure that would
require cops to hand out business cards after an interrogation. The bill is
still in committee.

Another bill soon to be put forth by Williams and
Councilman Brad Lander would create an independent inspector general to
oversee the NYPD.

A college student got an unpleasant taste of the
NYPD's stop-and-frisk program during a first-time visit to the Big Apple,
DNAinfo.com New York has learned.

Clayton Baltzer, 19, who is studying to become a
Christian minister at Baptist Bible College and Seminary in Clarks Summit,
Penn., came to the city on March 27 to see the sights.

Instead, he got a tour of the city's criminal
justice system after his one-inch pocket knife was spotted by cops.

Enacting the NYPD's strict zero tolerance frisk
policy, those cops not only went through Baltzer's belongings, but arrested
him and slapped him with weapons possession charges. A hearing on those
charges is scheduled for Monday.

Baltzer told On the Inside that it all started as he
passed through the Times Square subway station on his way to see the opera
at Lincoln Center, ending a day-long field trip to view the Dead Sea Scrolls
at the Discovery Museum, Ground Zero and the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

A panel of criminal justice experts said the city
needs to develop alternatives to the controversial stop and frisk policing
strategy because it is alienating entire neighborhoods.

The panel, organized by Manhattan Borough President
and mayoral hopeful Scott Stringer, said the number of guns recovered as a
result of stop and frisk doesn't justify the damage the tactic inflicts upon
police and community relations.

"Stop and frisk has become a defining civil rights
issue of our time," Stringer said during opening remarks of the forum, which
was held at Touro College on 125th Street....

Panelist David Kennedy, director of the Center for
Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said
there are much more effective ways to reduce crime than stop and frisk. He
said a small subset of young men in dangerous neighborhoods are responsible
for the violent crime.... "It's amazing how far away from common sense
we've gotten on this issue," Kennedy said.

Michael Hardy, executive vice president and general
counsel for the National Action Network, said the solution lies in using the
power of the ballot to elect a person willing to change the policy.
"Many communities would not tolerate this. They would use their vote to make
a change," Hardy said. "The next administration will have an opportunity to
change policing."

Lieberman said the decision by a federal judge
Wednesday to allow a lawsuit challenging stop and frisk to become a class
action suit is indicative of the type of efforts it would take to change the
policy....

Terrell Trip, who lives in Wagner Houses in East
Harlem, said he has been stopped and frisked and arrested multiple times for
minor infractions such as trespassing while trying to visit a friend. "I
sometimes feel like I'm living in Uganda. It doesn't make sense that this
occurs in America," said Trip.

__________

Anthony Goldstone, who was stopped and searched in
November 2011 and arrested:

"He [the police officer] pulled a blunt out of my
pocket, and he asked me, where's the weed? And I'm like, just because I have
something that involves weed doesn't mean I have the weed with me or on me.
I was going to the store to get that so I could smoke one, whatever the case
may be. And he was like, well next time I see you, I might just lock you up
for it."
link to brief recording of Anthony
Goldstone:
http://thenewyorkworld.com/public/2012/may/nyw-hotspots-map/media/Anthony-Goldstone.ogg

Yesterday, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly
promised more scrutiny and oversight for the NYPD's controversial
stop-and-frisk policy, outlining several changes to the policy in memos to
the NYPD and City Council. But as far as Mayor Bloomberg is concerned,
everything is working just fine, and there's nothing controversial about
stop-and-frisk, and he can't hear any complaints nah nah nah: "We're
going to keep doing this...We're not going to walk away from tactics that
work and we're not going to walk away from bringing crime down," he said on
his radio show this morning.

The Daily News seems to agree with
Bloomberg—they published two pieces today in favor of stop-and-frisk. In
one, columnist Mike Lupica calls stop-and-frisk an "imperfect" policy that
works for an imperfect city. The other focuses on Judge Shira Scheindlin's
opinion on the lawsuit, claiming it could send the city back to the bad old
days: "This is extreme and perilous judicial overreaching. Based on nothing
more, really, than numbers and an academic opinion that suited her beliefs,
Scheindlin has moved menacingly toward restricting the NYPD’s tactics."

A jury may
ultimately decide whether the New York Police Department has made improper
stops. A federal judge has granted class action status to a 2008 lawsuit
accusing the New York Police Department of discriminating against blacks and
Hispanics with its stop-and-frisk policies aimed at reducing crime.

U.S. District
Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan said in a written ruling that there was
"overwhelming evidence" that a centralized stop-and-frisk program has led to
thousands of unlawful stops. She noted that the vast majority of New Yorkers
who are unlawfully stopped will never file a lawsuit in response, and she
said class-action status was created for just these kinds of court cases....

By certifying
the lawsuit as a class action now, Scheindlin widened the lawsuit from a
case about four men alleging they were unlawfully stopped to a case where
the NYPD’s entire stop-and-frisk program is now before the court.

Plaintiffs
lawyer Darius Charney of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, in the
event a jury agrees that the NYPD is unlawfully stopping people and racially
profiling blacks and Latinos, class members will likely request oversight of
the NYPD by a federal court monitor. They also intend to ask for an end to
what they describe as a “quota” system, which they argue pressures
commanders and officers log a certain level of arrests, summonses and stops
every reporting period. Finally, Charney said class members will request
re-training and tightened supervision over stop-and-frisk practices.

Scheindlin said
she found it "disturbing" that the city responded to the lawsuit by saying a
court order to stop the practice would amount to "judicial intrusion," and
that no injunction could guarantee that suspicionless stops would never
occur or would only occur in a certain percentage of encounters.

"First,
suspicionless stops should never occur," Scheindlin wrote. She said the
police department's "cavalier attitude towards the prospect of a `widespread
practice of suspicionless stops' displays a deeply troubling apathy towards
New Yorkers' most fundamental constitutional rights."

She added that
if the police department was engaging in a widespread practice of unlawful
stops, then an injunction seeking to curb that practice is not the "judicial
intrusion into a social institution" that the city claims it would be but "a
vindication of the Constitution and an exercise of the courts' most
important function: protecting individual rights in the face of the
government's malfeasance."

... When asked
to comment on the judge’s class certification decision on Wednesday, Police
Commissioner Ray Kelly said, “It is what it is.”

A federal judge on Wednesday granted class-action status to a lawsuit
challenging the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics, saying
she was disturbed by the city’s “deeply troubling apathy towards New
Yorkers’ most fundamental constitutional rights”.... Over the weekend,
the police disclosed that they had made more than 200,000 such stops in the
first three months of 2012, placing the Bloomberg administration on course
for the largest number of annual stops in the 10 years the department has
been measuring them.

In granting class-action status to the case, which was filed in January 2008
by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of four plaintiffs, the
judge wrote that she was giving voice to the voiceless. "The vast majority
of New Yorkers who are unlawfully stopped will never bring suit to vindicate
their rights,” Judge Scheindlin wrote. The judge said the evidence
presented in the case showed that the department had a “policy of
establishing performance standards and demanding increased levels of stops
and frisks” that has led to an exponential growth in the number of stops.
But the judge used her strongest language in condemning the city’s position
that a court-ordered injunction banning the stop-and-frisk practice would
represent “judicial intrusion” and could not “guarantee that suspicionless
stops would never occur or would only occur in a certain percentage of
encounters." Judge Scheindlin said the city’s attitude was “cavalier,”
and added that “suspicionless stops should never occur.”

Despite the judge’s ruling and her pointed language, the city is unlikely to
change its course. Asked about the decision at a news conference at Police
Headquarters, Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, would say only, “It
is what it is.”

Darius Charney, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights,
pointed to a part of the decision in which the judge noted that there was
“indisputable evidence” that the department’s street-stop program stemmed in
design and implementation from the highest levels of the agency.

“This is not just about five or six bad officers; this is about a whole
department’s policies and practices,” Mr. Charney said. “Which is why the
best way to proceed with this case is as a class action, because it affects
hundreds of thousands of people in the city.”

The NYPD credited citywide declining homicide rates
to its increasing reliance on the controversial practice of stop-and-frisk
last week.

But in the 13 precincts citywide where homicides
were trending up so far this year, a WNYC analysis of the data found that an
increase in stop-and-frisk in the first quarter of this year did not always
result in fewer homicides so far this year....

Of the 13 precincts where homicides were up, stop
and frisks increased in six over the same reporting period last year. And in
the remaining seven, stop and frisks were down.

“There is no evidence that stop and frisk is
lowering or suppressing the murder rate in New York City,” said Chris Dunn,
spokesman for the NYCLU, in a statement. “Murders have dropped steadily
since 1990.”

The counter-trend of higher murder numbers is most
pronounced in parts of North Brooklyn in the cluster that includes the 77th,
81st, 83rd, 88th and 90th precincts where the number of homicides this year
to date doubled to 20 over the same period last year.

In the case of the 83rd precinct, stop and frisks
dropped significantly from 2,991 in the first quarter last year to 2,096
this year – but homicides were up from one to three.

Queens South, which includes the 101st, 105th and
the 113th precincts where murder is up, had 17 homicides so far this year
compared to 11 over the same period last year. In two of those precincts –
the 101st and 105th – stop and frisks were up by more than 10 percent year
over year.

“If you talk to people who live in neighborhoods
like Brooklyn North, there are lots and lots of people who will tell you
they don't feel so safe,” said Professor Gene O’Donnell from John Jay
College, a former police officer and prosecutor. “It is a tale of many
different cities."

Meanwhile, Staten Island reported an impressive 85
percent drop in the homicide rate year to date with just a single homicide.
But the number of stop and frisks remained roughly the same – 6,912 in the
first quarter this year compared to 6,827 last year.

The number of people stopped and frisked under the
NYPD's controversial crime-fighting tactic has increased seven-fold since
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly took charge 10 years ago — and even police
officials are asking why.

As the practice draws heavy fire from concerned
public officials and civic leaders, numerous current and former police
officials — some directly involved in establishing operational strategies
and overseeing Compstat during the Kelly era — want to know why it's grown
from fewer than 100,000 stops when Kelly took over in 2002 to nearly 700,000
last year.

These are not civil liberty union officials claiming
the program smacks of racial profiling. They are not cop-haters or
politicians using the issue to seek higher office. And they are not former
police officials turned academics criticizing from outside the department.

These are smart, veteran police officials who love
the city, the NYPD and cops. They are the types who believe there are few
callings in life better than fighting crime.

"If we are throwing 700,000 people against the wall,
what are the criminal profiles of the people being stopped?" one ex-official
asked. "Why are we stopping them? And if there are no summonses issued or
arrests made, why not?"

Another cop boss added, "And who is doing all this
stopping and frisking?"
If the majority of the stops are being done by experienced anti-crime cops,
"I have more confidence in their ability to police and make proper choices
on who to stop," he said.

"The ends do not always justify the means," one of
the officials recently told me as he described, "Stop, Question and Frisks"
as a program that should perhaps be re-named "Rousting Minorities."

A report released yesterday by the NYCLU uses the
NYPD's own numbers on stop-and-frisk to reveal the depth of racial
disparities and ineffectiveness of the policy. The report constitutes the
most comprehensive analysis of NYPD stop-and-frisk activity ever
conducted.... Using the NYPD's full electronic database on 2011
stop-and-frisk activity—which was obtained by the NYCLU after a successful
lawsuit filed in 2007—Data and Policy Analyst Sara LaPlante closely examined
different aspects of stops across the city including the use of force, race,
weapon recovery, location, and the treatment of hundreds of thousands of
innocent people stopped last year....

Despite mounting evidence that the policy is
ineffective, the NYPD attempts to justify stop-and-frisk on the grounds that
it recovers a large number of guns. In 2003, police recovered 604 guns as a
result of 160,851 stops. In 2011, the Department conducted an additional
524,873 stops (for a total of 685,724), yet only 176 additional guns were
recovered. Of the 685,724 stops in 2011, only 1.9 percent resulted in the
recovery of a weapon. And while blacks and Latinos were more likely to be
stopped, whites were almost twice as likely to be found carrying a weapon.
Even in neighborhoods without a majority black or Latino population, black
and Latino young men were still stopped at a rate disproportionate to their
white counterparts.

The single most common form of force was "hands on
suspect" which accounted for about 70 percent of the use of force within the
department. "I want to emphasize, however, that the notion that 'hands on
suspect' is a de minimus form of force is a notion that should not be
accepted," said NYCLU Associate Legal Director Christopher Dunn, "When a
police officer puts his of her hands on someone who gets stopped that
qualitatively changes the experience."

Other noteworthy findings in the NYCLU's report:
-
In 70 out of 76 precincts, blacks and Latinos accounted for more than 50
percent of the stops.

- In 10
precincts with black and Latino populations of 14 percent or less (such as
the 6th Precinct in Greenwich Village), blacks and Latinos accounted for
more than 90 percent of the stops.
- Of the 685,724 stops, 605,328 were of people who had engaged in no
unlawful behavior as evidenced by the fact that they were not issued a
summons nor arrested.
- The 75th Precinct in East New York had the most stops with 31,100 (27,672
innocent), while the 94th Precinct - in Greenpoint had the fewest with 2,023
(1,843 innocent).
- While the NYPD recovered one gun for every 266 stops in 2003, the
additional 524,873 stops conducted in 2011 yielded only one gun for every
3,000 people stopped.

Donna Lieberman blasted Mayor Michael Bloomberg and
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for the 600 percent increase in
stop-and-frisks since the mayor's first year in office. "Under this
administration, we have come to see a two-tiered system of policing in New
York," she said, "There's the kinder, gentler policing that we see on the
Upper East Side or in Park Slope and the up-against-the-wall policing we see
in Brownsville and Harlem." While the NYCLU maintains that a 2007 report
commissioned by the NYPD and conducted by Rand Corporation glossed over
racial disparities, the report did conclude that a city the size of New York
should be conducting roughly 250,000-330,000 stops annually. Lieberman,
reluctant to cite the report, noted that the NYCLU would not suggest what
the "right number" of stops would be. "That leads us into a conversation
about quotas," she said. "Quotas are antithetical to the constitutional
standard for stop-and-frisk."

Raw data cannot provide insight into the crushing
emotional and psychological effects put on black and Latino New Yorkers, yet
Lieberman suggested the abuse of stop-and-frisk has whole generations of
boys and girls growing up afraid of the very people who are supposed to be
keeping them safe. "In New York City's tale of two cities," she continued,
"Moms have to train their teenagers not just to behave, but if they're
parents of color they also have to try to teach them what to do if the
police stop them for doing nothing wrong on the way home from school."

In Greenwich Village and Soho, black and Latino
residents make up just 8 percent of the population — but more than 76.6
percent of those stopped by the NYPD last year are minorities, according to
new numbers released by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The percentage of black and Latino New Yorkers
stopped and frisked by the NYPD remained overwhelmingly higher than their
white counterparts across the city last year, regardless of what
neighborhood they live in, according to the NYCLU's report.

Stop-and-frisk numbers have risen dramatically in
recent years, increasing by more than 600 percent from 2002 to 2011, when
there were nearly 700,000 stops.

On the Upper East Side, Kips Bay, Murray Hill and
Turtle Bay — where the percentage of blacks and Latino residents is less
than 10 percent — more than 70 percent of those stopped were either Latino
or black.

On the Upper West Side and in Gramercy and Downtown,
the percentage of minority residents is slightly higher — 15 percent — but
as much as 76 percent of those stopped were black and Latino, the survey
showed.

“That is a striking indictment of the way the
department is targeting young black men,” said NYCLU executive director
Donna Lieberman, who called on the NYPD to find other ways to control
violence in communities.

“We need to put an end to stop-and-frisk abuse and
the wholesale violation of civil rights,” she added.
Nearly 90 percent of people stopped and frisked by the NYPD in 2011 were
released without any charges or evidence of wrongdoing, the study found.

The NYCLU found that less than 12 percent of the
685,724 recorded stops in 2011 led to an arrest or summons, with a far
higher percentage of young blacks and Latinos stopped and released than
other groups.

The findings were part of a new analysis of the
NYPD’s most recent data, which the group said paints a picture of “two New
Yorks” — where young black and Latino men are targeted for often-violent
searches, even in neighborhoods that are a majority white.

Is the New York
Police Department misusing its stop-and-frisk-policy? New York State
Senator Eric L. Adams, a retired police captain who was elected to the state
senate in 2006, thinks so. Adams, who represents sections of Boro Park,
Crown Heights, Flatbush, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Sunset Park, and
Windsor Terrace, has been vocal about various issues that affect the
neighborhoods he serves, including his objections to stop-and-frisk....

I think 80 percent of
New Yorkers, if they knew what the police department was doing with
stop-and-frisk, would also join those of us who are saying stop the
abuse....

Police officers are
told at the beginning of the night, “Officer Johnson you are going to go out
and you are going to search 10 people. Now if you don’t come back with 10
people, or fill out 10 of those forms, it’s going to impact your vacation
days. It’s going to impact your transfer.” So what is that police officer
doing? He’s not looking for that person who is hiding in the alley, he’s
not looking for the person that has possibly committed a crime. He’s now
just going out to fill his quota. So little Johnny is coming home from
school, [the officer] doesn’t care if Johnny’s committed a crime or not,
he’s stopping Johnny and he’s questioning him. He’s no longer frisking
to see if little Johnny has something that appears to be a weapon. He’s now
going through his pockets, which the rule doesn’t permit. Wow, I found
a joint on you, now you’re being arrested. That’s where the abuse is coming
from. That’s why you are seeing large numbers of black and Hispanic
children being arrested for carrying a joint or a bag of marijuana....

The outcry that we’re
having is that the police conducted over 700,000 stop-question-and-frisks
last year.... So you have a countless amount of young black and brown
children who walk the street and are being stopped for no reason and being
searched by police.... All of us feel good about having a cop on our corner
but when that cop on the corner is disrespectful to your son as he walks
home, you no longer want to see this guy on your corner.

New York has a moral
imperative to address violence. But stop-and-frisk practices are harming the
community in order to protect it, and the costs of those practices can no
longer be justified by the claim that nothing else will work. There are
other ways.

EAST HARLEM, NY
(PIX11)— The practice of NYPD officers stopping and frisking people,
whether or not they've committed a crime, is squarely in the spotlight now
that the New York Civil Liberties Union, or NYCLU, has compiled a list of
the ten police precincts where the practice is most widely carried out.
However, focusing on an individual case shows the impact that the practice
can have on a person's life.

"I've been stopped and
frisked yesterday," a man in his thirties from East Harlem told PIX11 News.
"The worst [case was] three or four times in one day."

He's the unnamed face of
the practice of stop and frisk. Unnamed because he won't give his name for
fear of being retaliated against by cops. He told PIX11 News that he and his
friends are very used to NYPD vehicles cruising by them, and if a cop in the
car feels there is any reason -- from inappropriate clothes for the season
to what police call a furtive glance -- to stop, question and frisk the
young men on the corner, they will.

"They're just
pinpointing us. They're not doing this to the colleges," the man said, while
standing with five friends on the corner of 103rd Street and 3rd Avenue.
"They're just basically doing that to the minorities."

The numbers bear that
out. The NYPD's own figures, analyzed by the NYCLU, show that 87 percent of
people stopped and frisked were black or Latino. The man who spoke with
PIX11 says he's all too familiar with the figures, having lived in three of
the top ten stop and frisk neighborhoods.

The last one he listed
is the precinct he lives across the street from now. The 23rd is just east
of the 28th Precinct where, last October, a group of protesters, in
conjunction with the Occupy Wall Street movement, held a demonstration
against the practice of stop and frisk. The demonstrators tried to block
access to the 28th Precinct building and were peacefully and voluntarily
arrested as part of their protest.

In a federal lawsuit
filed on Wednesday, local civil rights leaders are accusing the New York
Police Department of misusing permission from landlords to patrol inside
thousands of private city buildings by conducting stop and frisks that
unfairly target blacks and Latinos.

The lawsuit, filed in
U.S District Court in Manhattan, is the most recent in a series of
accusations that the NYPD is abusing its stop-and-frisk policies.

Brought by 13 current
and former city residents, the new suit targets the NYPD practice known as
Operation Clean Halls. Under the program, which has been around since 1991,
landlords of thousands of low-income buildings, mostly in the Bronx, sign up
to allow NYPD officers to roam the halls, corridors and courtyards in an
effort to reduce crime.

The suit, which seeks
class-action status, is not asking to do away with the program, but for the
NYPD to change tactics that it says stand in "stark contrast to the
program's professed purpose, which is to combat illegal activity in
apartment buildings with high records of crime."

"If you live in one of
the thousands of apartment buildings enrolled in Operation Clean Halls, you
are a suspect for no other reason than where you live," said Donna
Lieberman, director of New York Civil Liberties Union, which filed the suit
along with Bronx Defenders and a Latino civil rights group. She said the
officers' actions subject residents to "humiliating, degrading police
intrusions."

The current stop, question and frisk policy is not effective. Statistics
released this month by the NYPD show that 684,330 stops were performed in
2011, which represents a 603% increase since 2002, the year that data
collection began on this program. This makes for over 4.3 million times that
a New Yorker has been stopped, questioned and frisked during the Bloomberg
administration. This could be considered reasonable if it were the result of
a high level of criminal activity, but the numbers do not bear that out to
be true. An astounding 88% of those stops were of completely innocent New
Yorkers in 2011 and the same holds true over the entirety of the last
decade; indeed, almost 3.8 million stops have resulted in no arrest or
summons.

Again, one could say that this is excusable if it were stemming violence in
communities like mine. Unfortunately, the facts fail to even show that.
Weapons have only been found from a stop, question and frisk 1.03% of the
time, and firearms only 0.15% of the time. Meanwhile, data reveals a lack of
causative effect between the number of stop, question and frisks and the
number of homicides. For instance, the 75th Precinct, believed to have the
highest incidence of gun violence in the city, saw a 37% drop in stop,
question and frisks from 2010 to 2011, yet homicides also fell 6%....

According to a report released by the Center for Constitutional Rights in
connection to Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al., a federal class
action lawsuit challenging the NYPD's stop, question and frisk policy, found
that nearly 150,000 stops over the last six years lack any legal
justification, and all together 30% of all stops have been unconstitutional.
The NYPD's cavalier attitude towards the law has been most greatly felt in
communities of more color, which are overwhelmingly the target of the stop,
question and frisk policy. In 2011, about 87% of those stopped were black or
Latino... Even in low crime areas and mixed or mostly white neighborhoods it
is blacks and Latinos that are more likely to be stopped....

The current stop, question and frisk policy is not necessary. The most
important tool in an NYPD officer's crime-fighting kit is a great
relationship with the community. That is how trust is established and that
is how we get safer streets for all. Unfortunately, when pressured by
precinct quotas for producing UF-250, the focus shifts. Community members
feel targeted and shamed while many NYPD officers, on and off the record,
have reported they feel pressured and demoralized. All the while, crime
ticks upward and everyone suffers. As a result, the policy not only fails to
serve its purpose, it actually undermines the overarching goals of the NYPD,
which has transformed stop, question and frisk from a useful tool into an
utter tragedy.

________________

Represenatives from the New
York Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, members of
the NY City Council and others gathered at New York's City hall to protest
the city's ever escalating number of stop and frisks, up to 684,000 stops in
2011.

UPPER MANHATTAN — After hearing numerous complaints from residents about the
NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policy, Community Board 12 voted to
support a citywide resolution calling for the reevaluation and reform of the
procedure.

CB12’s public safety
committee voted on the resolution after a public hearing Wednesday on the
presence and impact of such policies in Upper Manhattan and changes they
would like to see. At the meeting, residents of color said they are victims
of a disproportionate number of stop-and-frisk checks. "We should hold our
police to a higher standard," board member Harlan Pruden said, calling the
practice "lazy" police work.

Of the NYPD's 700,000
stop-and-frisk incidents last year, 6,000 of them were conducted in
Washington Heights and Inwood during the first half of the year, according
to the Manhattan Borough President’s Office. Those 700,000 stop-and-frisks
in 2011 led to 42,000 arrests and another 42,000 summonses, civil rights
attorney Leo Glickman said at the hearing, citing NYPD data.

"That means, according
to NYPD statistics, 616,000 of those people were wrongly suspected of a
crime," he said. "Do you believe in your heart of hearts that in the great
majority of those cases, the police believed the young man committed a
crime, and in good faith got it wrong?"

The committee
resolution called for an examination of the procedure. It was based on a
similar resolution Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer presented in
September 2011 that called on the NYPD to "take steps to reform stop and
frisk immediately." That resolution called for a federal investigation into
how the practice is used in New York to determine whether racial profiling
remained a problem and whether increased accountability for precinct
commanders, enhanced training and the adoption of new techniques could limit
incidents of unfair targeting.

"We are very concerned
about the data that we have concerning the adverse impact that the NYPD
'Stop, Question and Frisk' policy is having on members of the Washington
Heights-Inwood Community,” Pamela Palanque-North, chair of CB12, wrote in an
email about the resolution.

Representatives of the New York Civil Liberties Union and other officials
gathered at the steps of City Hall Tuesday to criticize the New York City
Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy, which reached record heights in
2011 according to a recent report.

Officials at the New York City Police Department say last year, police
officers officially recorded over 684,000 stop and frisks—a 14 percent
increase from the year before....
"Innocent New Yorkers who on 600,000 separate occasions this past year were
stopped, frisked and maybe thrown up against the wall. Barely six percent of
these terrorizing encounters resulted in arrest," said Donna Lieberman of
the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The NYPD says last year, blacks were 53 percent of the stop subjects,
Hispanics were 34 percent, and whites made up 9 percent of those stopped....

Activists warn that sort of policing turns black and Latino communities
against the NYPD. "How dare anyone say these policies are good for our
neighborhoods when we are telling you that they are not," said City
Councilman Jumaane Williams. They say there's a better way for police to
work with the community.

"If you have a professional police force that is interacting in a
professional and respectful way,” said Michael Harding, an attorney at the
National Action Network, “you are going to have more people participating in
gun buyback programs.”

True to his
word, State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is putting the NYPD’s
controversial stop-and-frisk tactic in his cross hairs. Schneiderman’s
investigators are reviewing NYPD stop-and-frisk data and weighing whether to
issue a formal report — setting up a potential battle with Police
Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg, the Daily News has learned.

Documents
obtained by The News show Schneiderman has met at least twice in recent
months with top staff to discuss the NYPD program, which reached a record
high 685,724 stops in 2011 and has led to criticism of racial bias.
Schneiderman pledged in his 2010 campaign for attorney general to crack down
on “unjustified stop-and-frisk practices.”

His
spokesman declined comment. But a source with knowledge of the review said a
“working group” inside the attorney general’s office is analyzing records of
stops, including racial breakdowns of those who were subjected to the
practice. A decision has not been made to proceed with a more expansive
analysis, similar to one released by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in
1999....

A recent
report by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that of the record number
of stops in 2011, 88% did not end in a criminal charge or issuance of a
summons. In 2010, the state Legislature blocked the NYPD from keeping a
computer database of personal information of people who were stopped but not
accused of wrongdoing.

“There is no
question that stop-and-frisk is the source of massive civil liberties
violations and affronts to human dignities day in and day out,” said NYCLU
Executive Director Donna Lieberman.

BY THE
NUMBERS

In 2011:
685,724
people stopped by the NYPD*
53% (350,743
people) were black
34% (223,740
people) were Latino
9% (61,805
people) were white
88% (605,328
people) were not arrested or given a summons
819 guns
recovered

In 2003:
160,851
people stopped by the NYPD
54% (77,704
people) were black
31% (44,581
people) were Latino
12% (17,623
people) were white
87% (140,442
people) were not arrested or given a summons

The NYPD stopped and questioned a record
number of people last year, mostly minority-group members who were not
charged with any wrongdoing, newly released numbers show.

There were 684,330 stops in 2011, more than
six times the 97,296 stops in 2002, the first year of the Bloomberg
administration. Blacks and Hispanics were the targets of 87% of all
stops, while whites were involved in only 9%.

“This is not a problem that impacts New Yorkers equally,” said Donna
Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
“Little wonder that to many, policing in New York City is a tale of two
cities.”....

In Harlem, where some men sport buttons that read “Stop and Frisk” with a
red line through the words, Dominick Sanchez, 20, said he was stopped Monday
and questioned about robberies on the block.

“If you’re not white, you’re going to get stopped,” said Sanchez, who is
black. “I want to talk back to them, but they threaten you.”

In 2010, the NYPD, in a
campaign touted by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as a key element in the war
on crime, stopped more than 600,000 people throughout the city. From 2004 to
2009, police stopped 2.8 million people; the largest age group is males 15
to 19, following by males ages 20 to 24. Just 9 percent of the stops
resulted in an arrest. And in 2011, the police were on pace for 686,000
stops—a new record.

In the 2010 [Village]
Voice series "The NYPD Tapes," police supervisors in the 81st Precinct
in Bedford-Stuyvesant order cops to make a quota of one or two stops per
tour. Police Officer Adil Polanco, who was assigned to a Bronx precinct,
said similarly that there was a stop-and-frisk quota there. If those orders
are typical for most precincts—and that appears to be the case from the
tapes and Polanco's statements—then quotas are a key factor in fueling the
rise in stops...

In the month of January
[2012] alone, more than three dozen lawsuits alleging improper
stop-and-frisks were filed, based on a Voice reading of the complaints.
Extrapolated, that means that the city could be sued more than 400 times
this year alone just on improper stops.

The people who filed suit
last month appear to come from all walks of life—an auto mechanic, two high
school students, a commuter, a Transit Authority worker, a guy walking home
with a bag full of dog food. In all of the cases, the criminal charges, if
any, were dismissed.

Take Francis Destouche, for
example. Destouche, a 53-year-old auto mechanic with a clean record, was
walking home in the Bronx in October 2011 when he was stopped for no
apparent reason by police. They searched him, found nothing, and then
accused him of "throwing something away." He was arrested, held for 20
hours, and missed his granddaughter's birth. The charges were dismissed.
Destouche's lawyer, Paul Mills, alleges that the stop and the arrest were a
result of the NYPD's "quota policy"....

Or consider the case of
"M.S.," a 16-year-old Staten Island youth who says he was stopped for
walking down the street, detained, and searched. His backpack was searched.
He was physically restrained. Charges were eventually dismissed. The lawsuit
goes on to quote at length from stop-and-frisk studies, which suggest a bias
against young black and Hispanic males.

Scott Joyner was waiting
for a bus in Brooklyn in June 2011 when he saw cops arresting two other
people. An officer walked over and grabbed his arm but released him when he
realized Joyner was just standing at the bus stop. Joyner walked to a pay
phone to file a 311 complaint, and there he was arrested, he alleges, for
trying to make a complaint. Charges were dismissed.

In January 2011, Jamie
Jarrett was walking down a Brooklyn street when a van of cops rolled up and
began searching him. They found no weapons or drugs. The officers refused to
explain why they were placing him under arrest. The charge of marijuana sale
was dismissed, but not before Jarrett spent 48 hours in custody....

Likewise, Jarrett Savage
claims he was illegally stopped and frisked in October 2010 in Brooklyn. He
was pushed against a wall, searched, and taken to the precinct, where he was
strip-searched in front of another prisoner. The charges were dismissed
eventually...

Ramon Morales says he was
cleaning his car outside his sister's house on Cabrini Boulevard in
Manhattan in August 2009 when cops stopped him for no apparent reason,
accused him of drug possession, and searched him and the car. They found no
drugs but charged him with a DWI, even though he wasn't driving. Eighteen
court appearances and nearly two years later, the charges were dismissed.
And Morales claims someone stole stuff from his car while it was in police
custody.

Daryl George, a 36-year-old
transit worker who had never been arrested, sued this month following a
questionable stop in January 2011. George says he was talking with a friend
about buying an iPod in the lobby of a Brooklyn building when police came
in, ordered everyone against the wall, and searched them. George didn't have
any contraband, though someone else in the lobby did. George was arrested
anyway, and though the charges were dismissed and the case was sealed, he
was suspended by the Transit Authority and lost five months' pay and
benefits.

Kevin Adams claimed he was
illegally searched and arrested in February 2010 in the lobby of the
Brooklyn building where he lives with his mother. Later that day—the arrest
took place at 10 a.m.—they released him because the district attorney
declined to prosecute, but not before he was roughed up and strip-searched
in a police van.

Gregory Pope also sued last
month. He claims he was walking on Coney Island in August 2011 when he was
jumped by four plainclothes officers. They searched him. He told them they
couldn't just search him for no reason. After that, they arrested him and
strip-searched him at the precinct. The police also took his car to the
precinct, where they searched it and caused a range of damage. Pope was held
in the precinct for a day and then, inexplicably, released without charges.

Schedrick Campbell was
walking home with a bag of dog food in March 2011 in Brooklyn when three
plainclothes officers grabbed him, accused him of swallowing drugs, and
tackled him. Despite a strip search in the precinct and a series of forced
and invasive medical tests over two days at Interfaith Hospital, no
contraband was found. The hospital billed Campbell $9,500 for the concocted
arrest.

And in April 2011, while
Keenan Baskerville was walking down a Brooklyn street, he was stopped by
police, accused of smoking marijuana, which he denied, and arrested. He was
strip-searched, but no contraband was found. Baskerville also sued.

Monique Williams sued as
well. She says that when she asked why she was stopped, a police sergeant
said to her, "Because I can," a statement that doesn't appear in the NYPD's
official stop-and-frisk policy....

* * * *

Meanwhile, the endless
saga that is Floyd v. City of New York continues to lumber through
federal court. Floyd is a class-action lawsuit filed in 2008 by four
citizens and the Center for Constitutional Rights that alleges that the
NYPD's massive stop-and-frisk campaign routinely violates the civil rights
of New Yorkers. (One citizen is the first named plaintiff, David Floyd, of
the Bronx.)

In the latest legal
maneuvering in nearly four years of litigation, the plaintiffs have asked
the judge for "class certification," which would open the door for hundreds
of thousands of additional plaintiffs. The city, on the other hand, is
trying to block expert testimony from Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University
professor who wrote a study of the strategy.... Darius Charney, lead
attorney for the plaintiffs, says the city has refused to engage in any
substantive settlement talks, despite the fact the issue is "of great public
concern," the judge in the case wrote...

As for the NYPD's claim
that the campaign acts as a deterrent to crime—the city uses the Orwellian
term "pre-emptive policing"—even though it produces relatively few
convictions, Charney says there is "no empirical proof" of that. "There's no
study that shows that aggressive stop-and-frisk deters crime," he says. "And
you have to have reasonable suspicion under the Fourth Amendment. If they
did 700,000 stops a year legally, we wouldn't have a complaint. But we
contend the vast majority are illegal."

The Floyd case
actually suffered a blow earlier this year, when U.S. District Judge Shira
Scheindlin ruled that police had enough reasonable suspicion to frisk Floyd
himself.... Scheindlin based the decision on the city's claim that officers
were acting on an ongoing pattern of burglaries in the area.

The CCR lawyers, however,
went back and looked at the crime statistics for the preceding two months
and found, instead, that there had been just one burglary in that area
during the period. They filed a new motion based on that.In November,
Scheindlin granted the motion. She noted the new evidence was "deeply
concerning to the court." "Shockingly," Scheindlin wrote, police use the
justification of "high-crime area" in stops even in low-crime areas.
Fifty-five percent of stops are justified with that notation. The city
justified its stop of Floyd with the high-crime notation. "Plaintiffs have
now raised severe doubts about the existence of that [burglary] pattern,"
Scheindlin wrote, adding that "it would be a miscarriage of justice" to deny
Floyd's legal claim as a result.

WHEN
I was 14, my mother told me not to panic if a police officer stopped me. And
she cautioned me to carry ID and never run away from the police or I could
be shot. In the nine years since my mother gave me this advice, I have had
numerous occasions to consider her wisdom.

One
evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin
and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and
Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get
some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that
runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by,
enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars
surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was
stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at
me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand
reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through
and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The
officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in
town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Less
than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and
frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my
grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked
down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers
jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a
garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID.
Then they let me go.

I was
stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from
the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and
let go.

We
need change. When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a
respectable and honorable job to keep people safe and fight crime. Now, I
think their tactics are unfair and they abuse their authority. The police
should consider the consequences of a generation of young people who want
nothing to do with them — distrust, alienation and more crime.

Last
May, I was outside my apartment building on my way to the store when two
police officers jumped out of an unmarked car and told me to stop and put my
hands up against the wall. I complied. Without my permission, they removed
my cellphone from my hand, and one of the officers reached into my
pockets, and removed my wallet and keys. He looked through my wallet,
then handcuffed me. The officers wanted to know if I had just come out of a
particular building. No, I told them, I lived next door.

One
of the officers asked which of the keys they had removed from my pocket
opened my apartment door. Then he entered my building and tried to get into
my apartment with my key. My 18-year-old sister was inside with two of our
younger siblings; later she told me she had no idea why the police were
trying to get into our apartment and was terrified. She tried to call me,
but because they had confiscated my phone, I couldn’t answer.

Meanwhile, a white officer put me in the back of the police car. I was still
handcuffed. The officer asked if I had any marijuana, and I said no.
He removed and searched my shoes and patted down my socks. I asked why
they were searching me, and he told me someone in my building complained
that a person they believed fit my description had been ringing their bell.
After the other officer returned from inside my apartment building, they
opened the door to the police car, told me to get out, removed the handcuffs
and simply drove off. I was deeply shaken.

In “Why Is
the N.Y.P.D. After Me?” (Sunday Review, Dec. 18), Nicholas K. Peart
illustrates how the lives of young black men are violated regularly by the
police, usually without any merit.

Our
analysis of 2009 stop-and-frisk data for the New York police shows that 94
percent of stops in 2009 did not lead to an arrest. The analysis also showed
that there were 132,000 stops of black men 16 to 24. This is particularly
striking since according to Census Bureau data that we examined, only
120,000 black men of that age lived in New York City in 2009. So on average,
every young black man can be expected to be stopped and frisked by the
police each year.

We cannot
accept that so many young people experience their lives this way,
particularly at such a formative stage. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s recent
Young Men’s Initiative made little attempt to address stop-and-frisk policy.
We must stop treating young black men like criminals and start thinking of
them as potential assets to our recovering and growing economy and society.
Until we do, our efforts to improve their education and employment prospects
will be hollow.

Lazar
Treschan, Director of Youth Policy, Community Service Society of New York

________________

Although the following is a
national story, and not explicitly about stop and frisks, it is
represenative of what has been happening in New York City and in every big
city in America.

Nearly one in three
people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study published Monday in
Pediatrics found. "Arrest is a pretty common experience," says
Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte
and principal author of the study.... The latest study finds 30.2% of young
people will be arrested by age 23....

The new
study is an analysis of data collected between 1997 and 2008 by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics. The annual surveys conducted over 11 years asked
children, teens and young adults between the ages of 8 and 23 whether they
had ever been arrested by police or taken into custody for illegal or
delinquent offenses.

The question
excluded only minor traffic offenses, so youth could have included arrests
for a wide variety of offenses such as truancy, vandalism, underage
drinking, shoplifting, robbery, assault and murder — any encounter with
police perceived as an arrest, Brame says...

The high
rate of arrest among youth is troubling because the records will follow them
as adults and make it harder for them to get student loans, jobs and
housing, says Kurlychek, an associate professor at University at Albany-SUNY
who studies juvenile delinquency. "Arrests have worse consequences than ever
for these juveniles," she says. Arrest records "follow you forever. The
average teenager who steals an iPod or is arrested for possession of
marijuana — why do we make that define their lives?"

_____________

New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman, joined by
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (far l.), City Councilman Jumaane
Williams (c.) and others, calls for a change to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk
policy during a news conference on the steps of City Hall

The
arrest of a New York City police officer, who was accused of violating the
civil rights of an African-American man during a stop-and-frisk arrest,
provides good reason for Justice Department officials and state lawmakers to
investigate whether others on the force are engaging in similar practices.
Federal prosecutors on Monday charged the officer, Michael Daragjati, with
violating the man’s constitutional rights by falsely accusing him of
resisting arrest. The criminal complaint suggests how easily that charge can
be abused. Nearly 6,000 New Yorkers were taken into custody last year
with resisting arrest as the most serious charge against them, the New York
State Division of Criminal Justice Services has reported.

The
African-American man was walking in a residential area of Staten Island when
he was stopped, shoved against the side of a parked van and searched
by Officer Daragjati, who is white. The officer found no drugs or weapons,
but grew angry when the man complained about his treatment and asked for the
officer’s name and badge number. Prosecutors say that Officer Daragjati
arrested the man, who put up no struggle, and falsified a police report,
charging the man with resisting arrest, a misdemeanor.

The
officer’s conduct might easily have escaped notice had he not been under
surveillance for alleged extortion and insurance fraud, with which he has
also been charged. Civil rights lawyers have long complained about
trumped-up arrests of mainly minority citizens who are dragged into the
criminal justice system.

Commissioner
Raymond Kelly recently directed the police not to arrest people with small
amounts of marijuana unless the drug is in open view. Low-level marijuana
offenses have contributed to the arrests of hundreds of thousands of people
since the mid-1990s. We need to know whether bogus charges of resisting
arrest are widespread.

We support
the call by your editorial board and several public officials for a federal
investigation into the stop-and-frisk policies of the New York Police
Department. The recent allegation that a Staten Island police officer
fabricated charges against a person of color after he protested being
stopped for no reason, together with the disturbing statistics that the vast
majority of those stopped by the N.Y.P.D. are black or Hispanic, continues
to raise troubling questions about the fairness of these policies.

Too many
young men of color are being needlessly brought into the criminal justice
system, only to come out with a criminal record, thereby limiting their
future prospects. It is time for an in-depth investigation of this
situation, which can be done only by the federal government.

The Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, arguing that Police
Department practices are creating a “wall of distrust” between officers and
minorities, plans to call this weekend for a major re-examination of the
department’s stop-and-frisk policy.

Mr. Stringer plans to argue at a symposium that the spiraling use of the
practice — stopping and searching people who officers believe may be armed
and dangerous — is disproportionately directed at blacks and Latinos,
constituting harassment and making those demographic groups less likely to
assist the police in investigations. There were about 600,000 stop-and-frisk
encounters in New York City last year.

“We cannot wait a minute longer to have an honest examination of
stop-and-frisk and the collateral damage it inflicts on our city every day,”
Mr. Stringer says....

Mr. Stringer proposes several changes, including establishing “clear
behavioral triggers” to justify a stop-and-frisk; currently, he said, the
police often cite “furtive movement” as their only justification. Mr.
Stringer suggests trying alternate policing techniques, which he said have
been used successfully in other cities. He cited a Boston program called
Operation Ceasefire, which sought to deter gang violence...

Criticism of the practice has grown recently. Early this month, a black city
councilman and a city aide were arrested while walking in a restricted area
along the route of the West Indian Labor Day parade in Brooklyn, in what the
arrested men have alleged was a case of racial profiling. The episode
prompted several city officials, including Mr. Stringer, to argue that the
increasing use of the stop-and-frisk practice had contributed to a culture
of racial bias in policing.

The practice is also the subject of a legal challenge brought by the Center
for Constitutional Rights. Last month, a federal judge rejected the city’s
effort to have the case dismissed.

Tens
of thousands of times over six years, the police stopped and questioned
people on New York City streets without the legal justification for doing
so, a new study says. And in hundreds of thousands of more cases, city
officers failed to include essential details on required police forms to
show whether the stops were justified, according to the study written by
Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia Law School.

The study was conducted on
behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the New York
Police Department for what the center says is a widespread pattern of
unprovoked and unnecessary stops and racial profiling in the department’s
stop-question-and-frisk policy.... The study
examined police data cataloging the 2.8 million times from 2004 through 2009
that officers stopped people on the streets to question and sometimes frisk
them...

Professor Fagan found that in
more than 30 percent of stops, officers either lacked the kind of suspicion
necessary to make a stop constitutional or did not include sufficient detail
on police forms to determine if the stops were legally justified. The study
also found that even accounting for crime patterns in the city’s various
neighborhoods, officers stopped minorities at disproportionate rates.

Nearly 150,000 of the stops —
6.7 percent of all cases in which an officer made a stop based on his own
discretion, rather than while responding to a radio call in which some
information had already been gathered — lacked legal sufficiency, the study
concluded. Stops were considered unjustified if officers provided no primary
reason articulating a reasonable suspicion for the stop.

For example, if an
officer conducted a stop solely because a person was in a high-crime area —
without listing a primary reason, like the person “fits a description” of a
crime suspect or appeared to be “casing” a store — the stop was considered
unjustified. If an officer cited only “other” as the reason for the stop,
with no other details, it was deemed unjustified in the study. An
additional 544,000 cases, or 24 percent of all discretionary stops, did not
have enough information on the forms that officers are required to fill out
after such encounters.

The United States Supreme
Court has held that in order for police officers to stop someone, they must
be able to articulate a reasonable suspicion of a crime. To frisk them, they
must have a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous. Darius
Charney, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the study
... "confirms what we
have been saying for the last 10 or 11 years, which is that ... it is really race, not crime, that is driving this,” Mr. Charney
said....

Force was 14 percent more
likely to be used in stops of blacks and 9.3 percent more likely for
Hispanics, compared with white suspects. Guns were not often found (they
were discovered in 0.15 percent of all stops). And weapons and other
contraband were seized nearly 15 percent less often in stops of blacks than
of whites, and nearly 23 percent less often in stops of Hispanics. If stops
that resulted in some form of sanction, blacks were 31 percent more likely
than whites to be arrested than issued summonses.

Police stop a man in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in
the lobby of his apartment building / NY Times

When Night
falls, police officers blanket some eight odd blocks of Brownsville,
Brooklyn. Squad cars with flashing lights cruise along the main avenues...
On the inner streets, dozens of officers, many fresh out of the police
academy, walk in pairs or linger on corners. Others, deeper within the urban
grid, navigate a maze of public housing complexes, patrolling the stairwells
and hallways. This small army of officers, night after night, spends much of
its energy pursuing the controversial Police Department tactic known as
“Stop, Question, Frisk,” and it does so at a rate unmatched anywhere else in
the city.

The officers
... stop and question people who merely enter the public housing project
buildings without a key; they ask for identification from, and run warrant
checks on, young people halted for riding bicycles on the sidewalk....

Between
January 2006 and March 2010, the police made nearly 52,000 stops on these
blocks and in these buildings, according to a New York Times
analysis.... These encounters amounted to nearly one stop a year for
every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks. In some instances,
people were stopped because the police said they fit the description of a
suspect. But the data show that fewer than 9 percent of stops were made
based on “fit description.” Far more — nearly 26,000 times — the police
listed either “furtive movement,” a catch-all category that critics say can
mean anything, or “other” as the only reason for the stop. Many of the
stops, the data show, were driven by the police’s ability to enforce
seemingly minor violations of rules governing who can come and go in the
city’s public housing.

The encounters ... yield few arrests. Across the city, 6 percent of stops
result in arrests. In these roughly eight square blocks of Brownsville, the
arrest rate is less than 1 percent. The 13,200 stops the police made in this
neighborhood last year resulted in arrests of 109 people. In the more than
50,000 stops since 2006, the police recovered 25 guns....

New York is
among several major cities across the country that rely heavily on the
stop-and-frisk tactic, but few cities, according to law enforcement experts,
employ it with such intensity. In 2002, the police citywide documented
97,000 of these stops; last year, the department registered a record:
580,000....

The United
States Supreme Court established the legal basis for stops and frisks
— reasonable belief that a person is armed and dangerous — in the 1968 case
of Terry v. Ohio. But the officer in that case had a far different level of
experience than many of the officers walking the streets of Brownsville. He
had patrolled the same streets of downtown Cleveland for 30 years looking
for pickpockets and shoplifters. By
comparison, the nearly 200 officers who operate in the neighborhood as part
of Mr. Kelly’s “Impact Zone” program ... are largely on their first
assignment out of the academy.

The data
show the initiative is conducted aggressively, sometimes in what can seem
like a frenzy. During one month — January 2007 — the police executed an
average of 61 stops a day. The high number of stops in this part of
Brooklyn can be explained in part by the fact that police can use violations
of city Housing Authority rules to justify stops. For instance, the Housing
Authority, which oversees public housing developments, forbids people from
being in their buildings unless they live there or are visiting someone.

And so on a single Friday in January 2009, the police stopped 109 people in
this area, 55 of them inside the project buildings, almost half for
suspicion of trespassing. The show of force resulted in two arrests for
misdemeanor possession of marijuana and misdemeanor possession of a weapon.

Inside
the project buildings and out, males 15 to 34 years of age, who make up
about 11 percent of the area’s population, accounted for 68 percent of the
stops over the years. That amounted to about five stops a year each,
though it was impossible to tell how often someone was stopped or if that
person lived in the neighborhood, because the data did not include the names
or addresses of those stopped. Police officials say the age figures sound
right, since most crime suspects fit that description.

Young black
men get stopped so often that a few years ago, Gus Cyrus, coach of the
football team at nearby Thomas Jefferson High School, started letting his
players leave practice with their bright orange helmets so the police would
not confuse them with gang members. “My players were always calling me
saying ‘Coach, the police have me,’ ” Mr. Cyrus said....

Almost
everyone in the projects has a story. There is Jonathan Guity, a 26-year-old
legal assistant with no criminal record, who, when asked how many times he
had been stopped in the neighborhood where he grew up, said, “Honestly, I’d
say 30 to 40 times. I’m serious.” ....

Oddly, years
ago when crime was higher, relations with the police seemed better, several
residents said. The officers seemed to show a greater sense of who was law
abiding and who was not, they said. Now, many residents say, the newer
crop of officers seem to be more interested in small offenses than engaging
with residents. “Rookies,” said Sandra Carter, 60, as she sat on a bench
outside 372 Blake Avenue.

------

This article
has been revised to reflect the following correction:
July 28, 2010:
An article on July 12 about the New York Police Department’s tactic known as
“Stop, Question, Frisk” and its application in eight blocks of Brownsville,
Brooklyn, referred imprecisely to the legal standard that governs when
police officers are permitted to frisk someone. The United States Supreme
Court has held that in order for the police to frisk someone they must have
a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous. The standard
cited in the article — reasonable suspicion of a crime — is enough to
justify a stop, but not enough to make a legal frisk.

_______________

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Police
officers stopped a man in Brownsville, Brooklyn after he was seen spitting
on the sidewalk and entering an unlocked door.
After a check for warrants,
he was let go.

From 2004 through 2009, in a policy
that has gotten completely out of control, New York City police officers
stopped people on the street and checked them out nearly three million
times, frisking and otherwise humiliating many of them. Upward of 90 percent
of the people stopped are completely innocent of any wrongdoing....

Not only are most of the
people innocent, but a vast majority are either black or Hispanic. There is
no defense for this policy. It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should
offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease.

Police Department statistics
show that 2,798,461 stops were made in that six-year period. In 2,467,150 of
those instances, the people stopped had done nothing wrong. That’s 88.2
percent of all stops over six years. Black people were stopped during that
period a staggering 1,444,559 times. Hispanics accounted for 843,817 of the
stops and whites 287,218.

While crime has been going
down, the number of people getting stopped by the police is going up. Last
year, more than 575,000 stops were made — a record. But 504,594 of those
stops were of people who had done nothing wrong. They had committed no
crime, were issued no summonses and were carrying no weapons or illegal
substances.

Still, day after day, the cops continue harassing and degrading
these innocent New Yorkers, often making them line up against walls, or lean
spread-eagled on the hoods of cars, or sprawl face down in the street to be
searched like criminals in front of curious, sometimes frightened, sometimes
giggling, sometimes outraged onlookers.

If the police officers were
treating white middle-class or wealthy individuals this way, the movers and
shakers in this town would be apoplectic. The mayor would be called to
account in an atmosphere of thunderous outrage, and the police commissioner
would be gone. But the people getting stopped and frisked are mostly young,
and most of them are black or brown and poor. So Police Commissioner Ray
Kelly could feel completely comfortable with his department issuing the
order in 2006 that reports of all stops and frisks be forwarded and compiled
“for input into the Department’s database”....

So the
department is collecting random information on innocent, primarily poor,
black and brown New Yorkers for use in some anticipated future criminal
investigation. But it is not collecting and storing massive amounts of
information on innocent middle-class or wealthy white people. Why is that,
exactly?

_______________

_______________

"Police Report Far
More Stops And Searches" By Al Baker And Emily Vasquez, New York Times, February 3, 2007

The
New York Police Department released new information yesterday showing that
police officers stopped 508,540 individuals on New York City streets last
year [2006] — an average of 1,393 stops per day.... The number was up from 97,296 in 2002, the last time the
department divulged 12 months' worth of data....

[The police] department delivered four bound
volumes of statistics to the Council in midafternoon. The raw data showed
that more than half of those stopped last year were black... At the same time, the average number of people arrested
per quarter as a result of such stops almost doubled....

Until yesterday, the most
recent information released by the Police Department about how and why it
stops people to search them, sometimes looking for illegal guns, was from
2003... Some officials have said that lag put the department at odds with a
pair of legal requirements that sprang from public outrage at the 1999 fatal
police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed black street peddler....
[Many] contended
that there was a pattern of racial profiling in stop-and-frisks. A state
study later in 1999 confirmed racial disparities in such stops.

The guidelines to monitor
stop-and-frisks in detail were set forth in a city law signed in 2001, and
in a federal court case settled by the Bloomberg administration in 2004.
Both called for the Police Department to release to the City Council, four
times a year, basic data about the people who are stopped and questioned by
officers, and the reasons for such encounters. But until yesterday, it had
been a year since the department reported its stop-and-frisk activity, and
those numbers dated from a three-month period ending in September 2003.

In
the meantime, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent city
agency that investigates charges of police misconduct, found that complaints
involving stops and searches have more than doubled in recent years... Complaints involving
police stops now account for 33 percent of all complaints, up from 20
percent in 2003....

Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said later that ... aggressive
street enforcement was partly responsible for the increase in
stop-and-frisks. Also, he said, ''careful accounting'' of such encounters by
the department in recent years made the increase seem greater....

Jeffrey Fagan, a professor
of law and public health at Columbia University who studied the issue in
1999 for Eliot Spitzer, then the attorney general, said he was not surprised
that the number of stop-and-frisks went up ''during a period of no
accountability.'' But, he added, ''it is an astonishing fact that stop rates
went up by 500 percent when crime rates were flat''....

__________

'Stop-And-Frisk'
Searches Questioned By Sewell Chan, New York Times, February 12, 2007

Lawmakers yesterday questioned the substantial increase in the number of
people stopped, and often frisked, by the New York Police Department. The
reported number of stops was 508,540 in 2006, compared with 97,296 in 2002,
the last previous year for which 12 months' worth of data was disclosed. The
legislators -- five state senators, two assemblymen and a City Council
member -- contended at a news conference on the steps of City Hall that the
police practiced racial profiling against black residents, despite the
department's insistence that it did not, and they called for independent
federal and state investigations into the increase in stops. The police have
attributed the increase to more careful recordkeeping, as well as more
aggressive street enforcement.

At
14, Rocky Harris knows the routine: You raise your hands high, you keep your
mouth shut and you don’t dare move a muscle.... When they don’t find guns
or drugs, Rocky said, they let you go.

He said that he had been searched,
fruitlessly, at least three times since last summer, and that he had friends
who had been searched repeatedly. They tell you that you’re selling drugs.
But I don’t do nothing wrong. I just play ball,” he said, walking through
the Red Hook East housing development in Brooklyn yesterday morning, headed
to a community center for a game of basketball.

On Friday, the New York Police
Department released a report showing that police officers stopped 508,540
people on city streets in 2006, an average of 1,393 a day and quintuple the
number from 2002.... [It] was not hard yesterday in Red Hook to find a handful of that number walking
around.... More than half of those stopped, and sometimes frisked, by the
police were black.

Anthony James, 28, who works
for a large sanitation company and, as such, often keeps late hours, said
the police frequently stop him as he leaves or comes home. He said that the
stops had become such a problem that he has taken to carrying his work
identification badge home to prove to the police that he has a job and is
not selling drugs.

"You see where you’re standing. This is the Red Zone,”
he said, mapping with his hands a section of the projects from Columbia
Street to Clinton Avenue. “This is the war zone. If they catch you in here
alone they’re going to stop you.

_______________

New York Times / November 18, 2007

________________

U.S. Says
City Has Failed To Release Data on Frisks, By William K. Rashbaum, New York
Times, January 31, 2001

Federal prosecutors investigating whether the stop-and-frisk tactics of the
New York Police Department are discriminatory have told a judge that the
city stopped turning over data late last year that the prosecutors needed to
finish the investigation.

The city's action has prevented prosecutors in the office of Mary Jo White,
the United States attorney in Manhattan, from reviewing police documents and
information concerning people stopped or frisked by officers since April
1999. The situation was disclosed in a recent letter from her office to
Judge Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court, who is hearing a
separate civil rights lawsuit brought against the city and the Police
Department by people who say they were illegally or improperly stopped and
searched.

City lawyers have also stopped negotiating with the prosecutors over the
stop-and-frisk practices, said a lawyer who has been briefed on the talks.
The inquiry was undertaken to determine whether the Police Department's
aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics discriminate against blacks and Hispanics.
City and police officials have adamantly denied that their practices are
discriminatory.

________________

"The Broken-Windows Myth" By Bernard E. Harcourt, New York Times Op-ed,
September 11, 2001

There is little, if any, evidence that the crackdown
on squeegee men and graffiti scribblers has played much of a role in
reducing crime in New York. Since the early 1990's, most major American
cities have seen their crime rates drop significantly, in some cases even
further than New York's has. Many of these cities did not undertake anything
like New York's crackdown on small-time offenses.

A 1999 study of the 17 largest cities compared each city's most recent drop
in homicides. New York's rate of decline was the fifth-largest, behind those
of San Diego, Washington, St. Louis and Houston. San Diego, seated along a
major drug smuggling corridor close to the Mexican border, is particularly
interesting. In the late 1980's, its police department began adopting a very
different style — a problem-solving, community-oriented approach. While
recording impressive drops in crime between 1993 and 1996, the city also
posted a 15 percent drop in arrests and an 8 percent decline in complaints
of police misconduct.

Criminologists say a number of other factors have
contributed to declining crime rates in New York — among them, the sharp
increase in the police force. Former Mayor David Dinkins hired more than
2,000 new police officers, and Mr. Giuliani hired another 4,000. From 1991
to 1998 the force grew by almost a quarter, giving New York the highest
ratio of officers per civilian of the nation's large cities. A fall in
the crack cocaine trade, a strong economy, new computerized police tracking
systems, more prisoners and an aging population have also contributed to
lower crime rates.

The best social-scientific evidence has shown that a neighborhood's
graffiti, litter or public drunks do not necessarily point to a serious
crime problem. The research suggests that rather than leading to serious
crime, disorder — like crime — is caused by conditions like poverty and a
lack of trust between neighbors. The most rigorous research to date, a
1999 study by Robert Sampson of the University of Chicago and Stephen
Raudenbush of the University of Michigan, concludes that "the current
fascination in policy circles on cleaning up disorder through law
enforcement techniques appears simplistic and largely misplaced, at least in
terms of directly fighting crime."

Whatever effect the quality-of-life campaign has had on serious crime in New
York is, in all likelihood, not a result of fixing broken windows or
cleaning the city of squeegee men. It is because of the increased
surveillance afforded by Giuliani-style policing. The broken-windows policy
has made possible a 66 percent jump in misdemeanor arrests from 1993 to 1998
and sharp increases in stop-and-frisks that allow more searches for guns,
more checks for outstanding warrants and more fingerprint collection.

This enhanced surveillance has come with a big price tag: a 37 percent
increase in complaints of police misconduct from 1993 to 1999, significant
racial disparities in enforcement, illegal strip searches and many traumatic
encounters — some of them deadly — for ordinary citizens. It has also
aggravated racial divisions.
So do we need a broken-windows type of policing? Not for combating serious
crime. This approach to law enforcement diminishes trust between the police
and the community, violates basic rights and scapegoats the homeless and
other people we deem disorderly. Clearly, there still needs to be a mayoral
debate on whether New York City wants to bear that cost.

Bernard E. Harcourt is a professor of law at the University of Arizona
and the author of "Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows
Policing."

It is no longer news that racial profiling occurs;
study after study over the past five years has confirmed that police
disproportionately stop and search minorities. What is news, but has
received virtually no attention, is that the studies also show that even on
its own terms, racial profiling doesn't work. Those who defend the police
argue that racial and ethnic disparities reflect not discrimination but
higher rates of offenses among minorities. Nationwide, blacks are 13 times
more likely to be sent to state prisons for drug convictions than are
whites, so it would seem rational for police to assume that all other things
being equal, a black driver is more likely than a white driver to be
carrying drugs.

But the racial profiling studies uniformly show that this widely shared
assumption is false. Police stops yield no significant difference in
so-called hit rates -- percentages of searches that find evidence of
lawbreaking -- for minorities and whites. If blacks are carrying drugs more
often than whites, police should find drugs on the blacks they stop more
often than on the whites they stop. But they don't. In Maryland, for
example, 73 percent of those stopped and searched on a section of Interstate
95 were black, yet state police reported that equal percentages of the
whites and blacks who were searched, statewide, had drugs or other
contraband. In New Jersey, where police have admitted to racial profiling,
searches in 2000 conducted with the subjects' consent yielded contraband,
mostly drugs, on 25 percent of whites, 13 percent of blacks and only 5
percent of Latinos. A study of stop-and-frisk practices in New York City in
1998 and 1999 found that while police disproportionately stopped young black
men, the hit rates were actually marginally higher for whites than for
blacks or Latinos. And while 43 percent of those searched at airports by the
Customs Service in 1998 were black or Latino, illegal materials were found
on 6.7 percent of whites, 6.3 percent of blacks and 2.8 percent of
Latinos....

Other studies corroborate that drug use and dealing are equal opportunity
offenses.... A National Institute of Justice study found that most users
report getting their drugs from dealers of their own racial or ethnic
background; so dealing rates are likely to track user rates. These figures
suggest that race and ethnicity are simply not useful criteria for
suspicion.

The Customs Service's experience is illustrative. In late 1998, the service
adopted reforms designed to eliminate racial and gender bias in its
searches. In 2000, it conducted 61 percent fewer searches than in 1999, but
seizures of cocaine, heroin and Ecstasy all increased. From 1998 to 2000,
hit rates for whites and blacks increased by about 125 percent, from less
than 7 percent to 15.8 percent, while hit rates for Latinos increased more
than fourfold, from 2.8 percent to 13.1 percent.

Perhaps most important is that every year the vast majority of both blacks
and whites are not arrested for anything. A generalization linking race or
ethnicity to crime will therefore inevitably sweep in many innocent people.
And police will miss guilty people who don't fit their stereotypes. As
cities from New York to Cincinnati have seen, reliance on race corrodes the
legitimacy of the criminal justice system by reneging on its promise of
equality. But that's old news. The new news is that racial profiling just
doesn't work.

For
minority males across the city, the stop and frisk has become routine,
experienced by every class in every neighborhood. In street interviews this
week with 100 black and Hispanic males between the ages of 14 and 35, a
startling number of them – 81 – said they had been stopped, patted down and
questioned, without being arrested…. The respondents were asked to detail
their experiences with police and their attitudes toward cops. Many offered
candid accounts of incidents that left them feeling demeaned....

In
Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Gordon Ward called the experiences a blistering
rite of passage for young minority males. The 25-year-old Medgar Evers
College student estimated he has been stopped by cops 50 times. One night,
he said, he was stopped three times.... “They touch you and go through
everything you have, and you can’t say anything unless you want to end
up the way you don’t want to be,” said Edward Charles, 18, a messenger who
lives in the Bronx.... When it first happened, I felt like I was raped, but
now I’m getting used to it,” said Charles.

Not so for Alimany Yatteh, 18, an
immigrant from Sierra Leone who is still traumatized by his first brush with
the police. He said he was 16, walking down St. Nicholas Ave., when two cop
cars cut him off and officers jumped out and pushed him against a wall.
“Four of them aimed their guns at my head and ordered me to freeze,” said
Yatteh, who lives in Harlem. Cops searched his pockets and took his
identification, he said. “Everyone in the neighborhood was looking at me
like I was a drug dealer…."

Of
the 100 males interviewed ... only seven said they view the police as
protectors of the community, while 53 said cops are a controlling force and
40 see them as both. The number of stop and frisks increased dramatically in
1994.... Police Commissioner Howard Safir tripled street crime unit staffing
in 1997... “It’s not racial profiling, it’s dealing with the population of
a community in which there is crime,” Safir said....

But legal predicates
are little comfort to men and boys who feel as if they live in a police
state. Dereck Henry, a stocky 15-year-old from Washington Heights, offered
one of the ways he deals with it. “I walk straight down the street with my
head held high…. I show them that I am somebody and not what they think I
am,” he said.

Excellent two-minute video of interview
snips with young, black New
Yorkers about their stop and frisk experiences
The video is best viewed at 360p. To set the
resolution, start the video and move the cursor over the lower right corner
of the video frame, click on 360. Worth watching.